- From: William M. Perry <wmperry@aventail.com>
- Date: 16 Apr 1997 06:47:33 -0700
- To: "Fred L. Drake" <fdrake@CNRI.Reston.VA.US>
- Cc: "nemo/Joel N. Weber II" <devnull@gnu.ai.mit.edu>, www-style@w3.org
"Fred L. Drake" <fdrake@CNRI.Reston.VA.US> writes:
> I think this is the biggest problem with the current CSS specification;
> it is difficult to specify enough contextual relationship between
> elements to support all reasonable cases.
> A child-of operator needs to be available for selectors, so that we can
> write:
>
> div.major <child-of> p:first-paragraph { ... }
>
> I see that this was deferred to "later revisions," but that's not very
> satisfactory. Another possibility, perhaps that should be available in
> addition to rather than instead of the <child-of> operator, would be to
> support grouping and negation:
>
> div.major <not> div.minor p:first-paragraph { ... }
>
> could be used to specify the first paragraph in the intro to a major
> section (assume <not> is tightly bound). Also,
>
> div.major <not> (div.minor div.technical) p:first-paragraph { ... }
>
> would apply to the first paragraph which was contained anywhere so long
> as it wasn't a section targetted for tech-heads buried within a minor
> section; other div.technical elements would not cause the exclusion, and
> p:first-paragraph elements not in a div.minor would not be excluded. Of
> course, this could be done without grouping with:
>
> div.major div.minor <not> div.technical p:first-paragraph,
> div.major <not> div.minor div.technical p:first-paragraph { ... }
AIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH. Let's examine this - you want a
stylesheet language that has a programming language built in, and complex
selection rules using that programming language. You just described
DSSSL. Read the last bit of the CSS spec about:
We do not expect CSS to evolve into:
o a programming language
-Bill P.
Received on Wednesday, 16 April 1997 09:47:37 UTC