- From: Jon Bosak <bosak@atlantic-83.eng.sun.com>
- Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 14:03:06 -0800
- To: www-style@w3.org
- Cc: jbazuzi@vt.edu, lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk
[Chris Lilley, responding to Jay Bazuzi:] | > UA's which only want to do HTML wouldn't need DSSSL support | | I wouldn't go that far. DSSSL could well be useful with HTML too. I suspect that DSSSL is too complex to find much use with HTML in practice. On the other hand, all the proposals I've seen for CSS evolution are utterly inadequate for the solution of general SGML formatting (including print formatting, by the way). The key distinction here (which I think that many people keep losing track of) is whether the document can contain embedded formatting information or not. Attributes that assign formatting-related classes or style names to particular elements are (from the large-scale, long-term document management point of view) just as much embedded formatting information as specific font names or type sizes, because they prevent one from completely changing the rendition of a document based purely on its content, structure, and semantic categories. A stylesheet language that is suitable for specifying the formatting of generic SGML documents must be able to completely change the formatting without requiring any changes to the document. DSSSL is designed to provide the mechanisms needed to do this. For a markup like HTML that is moving inexorably in the direction of a kind of abstract RTF, this level of capability is probably not necessary. People who are interested in DSSSL and dsssl-o (a subset of DSSSL suitable for generic SGML Web browsers) should check out the following: http://occam.sjf.novell.com:8080/docs/toc.standards.html http://occam.sjf.novell.com:8080/docs/dsssl-o/do951212.htm http://occam.sjf.novell.com:8080/dsssl/dsssl96/ Jon --- Jon Bosak, SunSoft 2550 Garcia Avenue, Mountain View, CA
Received on Wednesday, 20 March 1996 17:07:57 UTC