- From: Chris Lilley <Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr>
- Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 19:35:59 +0100 (MET)
- To: bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM (Jon Bosak), www-style@w3.org
On Feb 3, 6:19pm, Jon Bosak wrote: > [Todd Fahrner:] > > | Effective scripting, much more so than effective table structure, is > | very unlikely to be generated by a robust WYSIWYG authoring tool. > > Not necessarily. PostScript is a programming language, and lots of > robust WYSIWYG authoring tools generate it. True. But I have only ever met one program that would read in arbitrary PostScript (as opposed to special, essentially declarative subsets such as Adobe Illustrator eps), let me graphically select and edit things, and then save it back out again. > It's a mistake to put DSSSL into the same bag as scripting languages. > Yes, DSSSL is turing-complete; yes, it's a programming language. But > a script language (at least the way I use the term) is procedural; > DSSSL very definitely is not. DSSSL is entirely functional and > entirely side-effect-free. Nothing ever happens in a DSSSL > stylesheet. The stylesheet is one giant function whose value is an > abstract, device-independent, nonprocedural description of the > formatted document that gets fed as a specification (a declaration, if > you will) of display areas to downstream rendering processes. Jon, what an excellent and concise overview. Would you give permission for a (duly attributed) quote on the W3C Style page. > * Make every other paragraph in this sequence of paragraphs bold. If > I add a paragraph in the middle, automatically change all the bold > paragraphs that follow it to medium and all the medium paragraphs that > follow it to bold. OK, that one is a style change. The others are structure or semantics changes. Which doesn't mean they aren't desirable things to do, just that they aren't the job of a style sheet. -- Chris Lilley, W3C [ http://www.w3.org/ ] Graphics and Fonts Guy The World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org/people/chris/ INRIA, Projet W3C chris@w3.org 2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93 +33 (0)4 93 65 79 87 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Tuesday, 4 February 1997 13:36:23 UTC