RE: Structure and Style revisited

Chris Lilley wrote:

> Jelks Cabaniss wrote:

> > Wouldn't it be better to have ...
> >
> >         <h1>The Old Man and the Sea</h1>
> >
> >         h1 { break-after: words(3,4); }
>
> yuk, not a whole lot better. It means that if I edit the content, i need
> to edit the style too; it means the style is only useful for thstone
> instance.

True.  But is that worse than having the markup only useful for that one
instance?

> > ... where "words" could take a single value or a list?  Maybe even have
> > "letters(...)" as well as "words(...)"?
>
> where word is defined as a sequence of letters separated by spaces? does
> that incluude ideographic spaces? Does that include languages which do
> not put spaces between words?

That's a very good point, which Daniel also brought up.  I have only a
superficial understanding of the Eastern ideographic systems, but surely there
are some ways this could be accomplished that would work regardless of the
language or writing system.  An "index" of some kind into the element perhaps,
to be counted by character *or* glyph?  And/or a substitutions of
characters/glyphs within the element?  In other words, insert line breaks ...

	* ... after the 18th and 32nd Unicode characters in H1#main, or
	* ... after the 2nd and 3rd [Space] characters in H1#main.

In the latter case, of course [Space] could be any Unicode character, so it
should be specifiable.

> What we are seeing here is a tip of an iceberg: to get the desired
> formatting, reqyuires either a complex style specification or some hard
> coded tweaks. Since the ful lrange of stylistic control is not there,
> the tweaks get used.

Yes.

> > How would one express the equivalent of <BR> in XML?

> <br/>

:-)

You're right, that was poorly worded.  Change it to: "How does one write a CSS
rule for an XML <br/> (or whatever we want to call it), so that it had the same
visual effect as HTML's <br>?"   Can it even be done?

> By moving away from "putting the breaks in" and towards "why did the
> author want hard breaks" we are more likely to get a general, robust and
> declarative solution, it seems to me.

If the lines mean something (as in verse), in XML they would be marked up:

	<line>Roses are red,</line>
	<line>Violets are blue,</line>
	<line>I'm schizophrenic,</line>
	<line>And so am I.</line>

styled perhaps with something like the following:

	line { display: block; margin: 0em 5em; }

But in the cases we were discussing, the author wants the hard breaks purely for
visual effect:

     Decline And Fall

          of the

       Roman Empire

Should authors throw in <BR>s (or <br/>s) willy-nilly, regardless of the output
media?


/Jelks

Received on Friday, 26 February 1999 12:19:38 UTC