RE: CSS and XLink

Two cents: take it for what it is worth at inflationary rates.

I believe it was expressly stated in the Fragments context section
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml-fragment#fci that the working group felt that
the pointers to the FCI's parent document's stylesheet was "general metadata
that shouldn't be included in the FCI set."  Outside of the pointers
included to the parent document maintained with in the fragment package
there is no reference to xsl or css.

Fragments, XLink and Style all seem to feel that the purview of this issue
falls in someone else's bailiwick.  I think this is very important.  I am
currently working on portal (syndication) business rules and am finding this
issue to be of major concern.  Unless we want to enforce a set of rules on
the allowable tag sets offered from the syndicator to the subscriber we will
need to define the style inheritance for fragments.

Do we allow the subscriber to force their own style/tags on syndicators.  Do
we allow the syndicator to force their style/tags on subscribers.
(over-simplification)

Is anyone working on correlating the initiatives/impact across multiple
groups?

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
Sent: Monday, April 12, 1999 9:52 AM
To: martind@netfolder.com; www-style@w3.org
Subject: RE: CSS and XLink


At 11:12 AM 4/12/99 -0400, Didier PH Martin wrote:
>You're right to bring the spot there. In fact, the interaction of style
>sheets and XLink is not so obvious especially in the case of browsers. When
>a Xlink is resolved and points to a XML document or XML fragment, it cannot
>be rendered unless a style sheet is associated to it (as you already know).

Glad to hear someone else is interested!

I have a couple of questions about your XLink/styling experience.

[Didier's original descriptions are at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1999Apr/0002.html.  They're
pretty long and quite detailed!]

Were your experiments with XSL or CSS?  I seem to think they were XSL, but
I'd still be very glad to work on CSS with the problems you've encountered
in mind.

Did you actually deal with inclusion of non-XML materials, like graphics?
Or was it all XML documents/fragments?

Finally, does the W3C's fragment working group have anything going that
might address the problems you encountered with fragments?

>Conclusion: when used only without links XML and style sheets are quite
>robust because the world is often controlled by the same authority. When
>linkage between documents occurs, serious potential problems occurs
(several
>hundred millions users, several million sites!!!). We just scratched the
>surface...

This is where it's going to get ugly.  I suspect the Link folks will point
to the style folks and vice-versa, which is why I'd like to get the world
talking about this early.

>I guess this is why the XLink group is jammed. The combination of XML
>documents and style sheets is really not obvious especially if you want to
>connect documents from external source where you don't have any control.
The
>rules become very important then. HTML got an easy life on this point
>because the language is already defined. XML means that several languages
>have to interact, with several thousands if not more potential languages,
>XML is more complex.

I'm still not convinced that style sheets is the best place to handle this,
but it seems to be the dumping ground for anything involving presentation
and/or behavior.  Since XML doesn't have the rules HTML provided, we'll
have to do something.

>So, you just put the spot on a troubled part of scene: XML links and style
>sheets. Or "XML document linking and rendition". This could be the title of
>a fun sci-fi movie or an horror movie, it depends of the scenarists :-)

Hmmm... maybe I should get out the latex makeup and paint my face green...


Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Monday, 12 April 1999 13:22:29 UTC