Re: CSS positioning (Re: colours for bullets)

>|   document tree  --+----> page layout flow --> rendered representation
>|                    /
>|   stylesheet     -+
>
>One of the major realizations that DSSSL forces on you (because
>otherwise you can't learn to use it at all) is that document objects
>(sections, lists, paragraphs) do not map isomorphically to layout
>objects (pages, columns, paragraphs).  The two are related closely
>enough that you can go a long time without realizing this distinction
>until you hit a case where the simple paradigm breaks down.
>Rearranging your mental model of what's going on can be quite painful
>-- it was for me -- but if you can't get past this hurdle, the complex
>cases are intractable.

Right, which is why most simple box-based stylesheet formats
cannot handle the hard cases.

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 1997 13:47:10 UTC