CSS and SGML document formatting -Reply

Today and tomorrow there is a meeting in Redmond, Washington, at the
Microsoft campus. This meeting brings together the HTML Editorial
Review Board of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the topic is
style sheets (CSS) for HTML documents.

I don't have a response to your particular question about <BR>, but I do
have a comment regarding your general question. There is considerable
concern among _some_ representatives to this meeting that CSS as
currently specified cannot be scaled appropriately to address general
SGML documents with arbitrary DTDs. _Some_ members believe that
DSSSL and, in particular, DSSSL-O (DSSSL online) provide a more
robust and scalable style sheet solution for SGML documents with
arbitary DTDs. Currently CSS appears to be designed for the HTML DTD,
and many observers have assessed CSS to be "good enough" for HTML.
As a practical solution for HTML, CSS appears to have generated more
industrial interest than DSSSL-O at the moment.

I am not in my office right now, but I will try to get a URL to a document
about DSSSL-O that is on a server maintained by Novell, and I'll send it to
you when have it. Thanks for raising this issue. It is wide open at the
moment.

-Todd Freter.
Corporate Publishing Services
Novell, Inc.
San Jose, California.

>>> Wolfgang Rieger <rieger@bse.de> 04/22/96 06:06am >>>
Are there any specs / discussion materials / whatever concerning the
extension of CSS for the formatting of general SGML documents with
arbitrary DTDs?

In particular: Is there material on the extension necessary to transport the
semantics now implicit in HTML (e.g. BR is empty and rendered as a line
break, H1 is a heading, etc.)?

Regards

Wolfgang Rieger
Buero fuer Software-Entwicklung           Email: rieger@bse.de
                                          WWW  : http://www.bse.de/
Rosenheimer Str. 214                      Phone: +49 89 497738	
81669 Munich, Germany                     Fax  : +49 89 497738

Received on Monday, 22 April 1996 10:15:20 UTC