Re: CSS2 Progress

Lars Marius Garshol writes:
 > 
 > While we are on the subject of the upcoming CSS2 spec: I see that in
 > the new WD of 04.nov.97 the section on generated text is still
 > not written and that the section on cue-before/cue-after is still
 > unchanged. 
 > 
 > You (the spec authors :) have earlier written that you are considering
 > these issues. Why did nothing happen? Is it because you hesitate to
 > extend the CSS model with properties that are allowed to insert text?
 > As far as I can see these issues are very important for XML,
 > accessibility and maintainability, so I'd very much like to hear the
 > rationale for not doing anything about them. (I don't doubt that there
 > is one, I'd just like to hear it.)

You are right that we hesitated to let CSS insert text, though not any
more.

The reason we hesitated was that we don't want any text in the style
sheet that might be a good index term for locating the document: such
a text should be in the source document instead. Purely decorational
things, like the words "chapter 7" in front of the chapter title are
fine, and, in fact, often necessary for reasons of accessibility.

However, it is impossible to draw a clear line. And as a result, no
technical limitation on the power of generated text will both allow
the generated texts we want and prohibit those we don't.

That much we knew when we published the 4th of Nov draft, and in fact
we already had half a dozen or so proposals for generated text
(collected over the past 2 years, and including ideas from the QWeb
browser[1] and Xanthus' word processor[2]).

We didn't put them in the draft, because the decision as to which one
to develop happened to be planned for the week after, and there were
too many possibilities to put all of them in.

 > Is there still interest in further suggestions/discussions on this
 > topic?

There certainly is, at least in the working group.

Current situation is that we want to be able to insert text before and
after an element. That text will have style properties of its own.

The possibility that different words in the generated text have
different styles is also something we want, but we won't work on that
until after CSS2. (For accessibility, text in a single style will
probably meet 90% percent of the requirements.)


Bert

PS. Lars,

 >  http://www.ifi.uio.no/~larsga/        http://birk105.studby.uio.no/

I read your home page. Do you have any publications relating to your
thesis already?



[1] http://www.sunsite.auc.dk/qweb/
[2] http://www.xanthus.se/
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos/                              W3C/INRIA
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 93 65 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Tuesday, 25 November 1997 11:33:28 UTC