Re: Paper on use of selectors for adaptive hypermedia

A few comments:

I think it is an interesting approach and one that should be
considered in relation to CC/PP (user profiles sent to server) and
Media Queries[1] (on client side, but with very limited profiles).

But from idea to implementation there is still rather a lot of work:
defining one or more formats for user profiles, defining the syntax
(see below), privacy/security (as Daniel pointed out), and some
missing properties in CSS, such as for disabling links (but they are
currently being developed).

Detailed comments:

1) The separator for Namespaces in CSS is "|", not ":" (because, when
Namespaces were invented, CSS was already using ":" for other things).

2) The special interpretation of the "bc" namespace is dangerous. It
appears to change the meaning of the following space (or "//" in
XPath) from "descendant" to "any". But what if the "bc" namespace
actually occurs in the document to be formatted? Since the CSS
matching code has to be changed anyway, why not add some syntax as
well?

3) Disabling of hyperlinks is indeed not possible in CSS2 (they can be
hidden completely, but not made inactive). However, in CSS3 we will
probably have what you need. We just don't know the names of the
properties yet.


Ad 2: The Media Queries draft uses an extension of the @media and
@import rules rather than an extension of the selector syntax. I don't
know if it is better to do

  @media <profile selector goes here> {
    <normal selector> {...}
  }

than

  <profile selector goes here> <normal selector> {...}

but you might give it a thought.


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries


Daniel Glazman writes:

> Minor comment in comparison with this one : the enriched document 
> example at the end of section 2 does not allow selectors like the 2nd 
> example of section 3 to work. HTML markup is not contained in the 
> browsingcontext element...

I believe the intention is that the presence of a "bc" namespace
actually causes the meaning of the selector to change.



Bert
-- 
  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 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Wednesday, 16 January 2002 10:00:56 UTC