- From: Jon Bosak <bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM>
- Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 08:46:31 -0800
- To: www-style@w3.org
- CC: bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM
[Steve Knoblock:] | >These aren't contrived or artificial examples; they're dirt-normal | >commercial publishing. Without programming, you can't handle even the | >last one. | > | | I agree they are real tasks in publishing. But should they be | generated as they are rendered or as they are authored? Should a style | language be generating or manipulating content? It should give you both front-end and back-end processing options, which DSSSL does (the transformation component makes it a very powerful tool for use on the back end). The general question of whether it's ever necessary to provide text processing at the client is a very good one. You could argue that all program functions should live on the server and that the client should never see anything but simple style declarations. (Our hardware people like this view a lot. :-) I won't argue this here, but I will point out that if all the processing takes place on the server, then you don't need stylesheets as separate entities -- if the server is generating the output on the fly, it's not significantly harder to embed style directives in individual start tags than it is to synthesize a stylesheet for a given document. I tried to point this out last year, but I think that most people don't want to hear it. Jon ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Bosak, Online Information Technology Architect, Sun Microsystems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2550 Garcia Ave., MPK17-101, | Best is he that inuents, Mountain View, California 94043 | the next he that followes Davenport Group::SGML Open::ANSI X3V1 | forth and eekes out a good ::ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8::W3C SGML ERB | inuention. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 4 February 1997 11:46:54 UTC