Re: From CSS to DSSSL

[Paul Prescod:]

| > But seriously, given that CSS is clearly the next wave of client-side
| > style, couldn't DSSSL be deployed effectively on servers, or at "publish"
| > time, to generate HTML+CSS? 
| 
| DSSSL has been deployed to generate HTML (in Jade -- I have built a
| whole website this way), and Jade will generate HTML+CSS as soon as CSS
| is supported in a standard way by major browsers. It is important to
| remember though, that shipping dumbed-down documents over the web is
| second best.

True, but I predict that you will see a lot of XML+CSS (as per-element
embedded style attributes) being generated from databases.  That's
what I want to see coming out of docs.sun.com as soon as I can get our
people to work on the experimental XML output some more.

| > In short, is there a transition path from CSS to DSSSL, or is all lost
| > already? :^)
| 
| I'm not sure how these questions address that, but yes, there is a
| transition path from CSS to DSSSL. CSS goes into 4.0 level browsers,
| for use primarily with HTML ,and DSSSL goes into 5.0 level browsers
| for use primarily with XML. At one point I thought that there needed
| to be some relationship between CSS and DSSSL in order to have a
| migration path from one to the other, but now I ask: "why?" Use CSS
| when it is convenient (small,simple documents). Use DSSSL when it is
| convenient (large, complex, structurally marked up documents).

That's exactly where I ended up on this.  CSS is simple and enables a
lot of functionality but is inherently incapable of handling the hard
cases; DSSSL can handle anything but is a bitch to learn.
Implementation is a wash.  So let's use both.

Jon

Received on Thursday, 17 April 1997 00:52:55 UTC