Re: The concept of cascading

Jon Bosak wrote:
> You can't prevent anyone from doing anything.  So what.

Termination can be an effective means of prevention, particularly when
applied to the employee rather than the employment.

> Every medium- to large-size corporation invests major money in
> creating a corporate personality for their public documents and puts

Don't most large organizations have a design review before allowing
documents to be published for public consumption? In the message that
spawned this subthread I wrote "large organizations' intranets". For
internal publishing, an author need only use the prescribed authoring
tool and structural elements, then apply the prescribed stylesheet link
in order to publish documents with a consistent look and feel. I'm sure
you're aware this is done now with paper documents -- multiple authors
use the same WP and stylesheet (template). The template includes the
corporate ID and can be enhanced with 'enforcement' macros.

A programmatic stylesheet with comprehensive layout control would be
more powerful than CSS and I never argued otherwise. But if a
departmental stylesheet rarely changes, CSS could facilitate style
consistency more effectively than verbal policies alone.

> ... it's been my experience that authors find it easier to
> work with policies when they are built into an interface than when
> they have to be memorized.  All things being equal, it should be
> easier to build policies into an interface using a parameterization
> model than using a cascading model.

Both API and allowable deviations would need to be documented. How else
would an author know the acceptable range for a parameter? You've made
the point that a parameterized stylesheet could programmatically
enforce an acceptable range where CSS cannot. But this implies that
some control is being given to individual authors.

In my earlier message I was hypothesizing a situation where authors
have no control over style at all. The departmental or project-specific
stylesheet, once designed, would not be overridden.

David Perrell

Received on Thursday, 1 May 1997 15:42:33 UTC