- From: William Perry <wmperry@spry.com>
- Date: Sat, 9 Dec 1995 20:30:36 -0800
- To: preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece)
- Cc: glenn@stonehand.com, www-style@w3.org
Scott E. Preece writes: > From: Glenn Adams <glenn@stonehand.com> > > | Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 10:13:00 -0600 > | From: preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece) > | > | Has the group thought about including more general textual > | transformations in CSS? Something like > | > | P.abstract {text-edit: "<B>Abstract</B> #value"} > | > | This is a fundamentally bad idea, one which has surfaced from time > | to time and quickly dismissed (at least in the form you have presented). > | Namely, HTML and style sheets are designed to be dependent of each > | other; one should be able to parse an HTML document independently of > | its style sheet and vice versa. If the style sheet were permitted > | to generate arbitrary content including markup, then this separation > | would no longer be possible. > --- > > I guess this makes me wonder if the HTML/stylesheet model is pitched at > too limited a level of functionality. When you say "stylesheet" to me > it covers a lot of things that do involve exactly this kind of > transformation - things like order of elements, presence or absence of > structural headings, ordering and punctuation of elements in > bibliographic citations, etc. > > The CSS proposal seems much more at the level that word processing > programs tend to use the word "stylesheet" - just typographic style > control. This has always seemed to me to be a key shortcoming of those > word processing programs, and one of the reasons I thought SGML, which > supports real structural markup, was a far better way for the future. > > I think I would be inclined to move my own authoring towards SGML, > rather than HTML, assuming I can find good tools. For truly complex things like this, I really think that DSSSL and/or DSSSL-lite are the way to go. I've been reading the DSSSL spec and doing a partial implementation for the Emacs-W3 browser (in my oh-so-copious amounts of spare time :) and it is much closer to what you want than CSS. I don't think CSS should try to do _everything_ that DSSSL does. Remember, it took 7 years to make DSSSL. :) -Bill P.
Received on Sunday, 10 December 1995 00:36:43 UTC