- From: <lee@sq.com>
- Date: Thu, 31 Oct 96 22:26:52 EST
- To: lee@sq.com, wmperry@aventail.com
- Cc: davidp@earthlink.net, www-style@w3.org
lee@sq.com writes: > Really, you're asking for break/paragraph properties, such as most > or all full SGML systems have. For each element, it's usual to be able > to specify > break before > the elment starts a new output line. > > break after > a new line is started immediately after the end of the element. > > A run-in heading would have > break-before: yes; break-after: no > > I may not be up to date on the latest CSS draft, but if the one I commented > on had that facility, I didn't notice it, and thought I would have done. Bill Perry <wmperry@aventail.com> wrote: > And older draft of the CSS specification had this property as proposed > for CSS v2. Its implemented in Emacs-W3 (actually, it is used for all > internal knowledge of when to break lines). Hello! I didn't know you weren't at Spry any more... Good to know that Emacs-W3 is still ahead of the rest...! > I'm actually working on going to a full DSSSL engine because CSS can't > really handle some of the stuff necessary to completely strip down your > display code to know nothing about HTML internally. CSS is terribly ad-hoc. We are going to end up with a dreadful legacy of documents with unidentified style fragments in them, too -- if you wanted to support user-defined DSSSL, I suppose you could use <LINK REL="STYLE" ...> force them to be external, and ignore all STYLE attributes. >> Of course, in an SGML application, one might be able to assign any >> property -- e.g. "tableness" -- from a style sheet. For example, in >> SoftQuad Panorama, you can say that <BODY> is a table, and that >> <H1> is a table cell... giving an interesting (and useful) effect. > Does Panorama support DSSSL yet? Not yet, unfortunately. I'm not sure of the status of DSSSL support within the ViewPort toolkit that we use for Panorama -- I haven't asked recently. >> In CSS you can do this to some extent by drawing boxes round things. > Yuck. >> It's hard to know when to stop adding power, though. If you want to do >> that sort of thing, use SGML directly & not just HTML. > > DSSSL is definitely the way to go for this type of thing. Tell that to the W3C :-) It may seem more fun to invent something yourself, and no doubt very satisfying to see it widely used. Well done for doing the Right Thing, Bill! Do let me (or perhaps the whole list) know if/when you have enough of DSSSL to try out. I'm sure James Clark would be interested, too. Now, if you could only persuade Netscape.... Lee
Received on Thursday, 31 October 1996 22:27:01 UTC