RE: An alternative strategy

[Chris Wilson:]

| Um, Jon, weren't you watching at the ERB meeting?  Microsoft Internet
| Explorer already *HAS* CSS stylesheets implemented (partially) -
| particularly, the stylesheet declaration, cascading order and rule
| matching, (*including* context-sensitivity!) are fully functional.

Microsoft is to be commended for its willingness to push the
technology forward in this case.  But I don't consider a
Microsoft-only solution to be a solution.

| [...]
| These rules only take up a few short lines, regardless of the number
| of items or length of text; that's not true if you use only embedded
| style attributes, and the content also ends up much larger with
| embedded attributes only.

This assumes that I as the publisher have calculated and inserted into
the stylesheet associated with each fragment only those style rules
that are relevant to that fragment.  Not fun.  The alternatives are
(1) supply the entire style sheet with each fragment; not a big saving
here (see the example style sheet in the current CSS proposal), or (2)
cache the style sheet; how far have you implemented this part?

| In my experience as a CSS implementor, the rule matching isn't the
| hard part, and in the long run, the work necessary for the rule
| matching (specifically, maintaining a representation of the document
| structure) will be necessary to support higher-end solutions anyway
| (so it's not throw-away work).

Are you sure that your solution scales to the general case?  Does it
scale gracefully to handle the couple of examples that I posted here
last week?

| [...]
| I don't thoroughly believe that DSSSL is a good solution for those who
| hand-author their documents (a very large set of people today).

I absolutely agree with you on this point.  But I bet that not many
people will really want to code full-blown CSS stylesheets by hand,
either.

Jon

---
Jon Bosak, SunSoft   2550 Garcia Ave., MPK17-101, Mountain View, CA 94043
A Davenport Group Sponsor        http://www.ora.com/davenport/README.html

Received on Tuesday, 30 April 1996 12:54:34 UTC