Re: CSS in XML format ?

----- Message d'origine -----
De: "Robin Berjon" <robin@knowscape.com>

>
> On Wednesday 10 July 2002 16:53, Patrick Andries wrote:
> > De: "Lachlan Cannon" <luminosity@members.evolt.org>
> > > XSL is already in XML format, while CSS has it's own unique one. I
find
> > > the syntax of CSS to be much much more intuitive for what it does, and
> > > would strongly object to it being rewritten in xml.
> >
> > Yes, I have heard this argument. Right now, having to convert it, I'm
not
> > at all convinced of its strength...
>
> Pretty much the rest of the world is though,

A fine psychologist, I see : peer pressure.

>especially as there are other  ways of solving your problem ;-)

In a standard W3C fashion  ?   ;-)

>If you  were to have
>
> <selector-list>
>   <selector>
>     <element-name>a</element-name>
>   </selector>
> </selector-list>
>
> to express "a" you'd be crying. More likely, you wouldn't be using CSS
> because it'd be dead.

I partly agree with this : it would have been dead initially (in the absence
of GUI tools). I will not dwell on this longer (I fear I will only hear the
same argument repeated : it is terse and you can use a program instead of
XSLT) but let me state (a last time ?) my position : terseness is a virtue
for manually produced stylesheets, I believe more and more are automatically
produced.

> Your problem has two simple solutions. Either you need to parse CSS for a
> program of some sort, in which case you can use SAC (open source
> implementations available for at least Perl, C++, and Java).

Ah, interesting.

> If you absolutely need to have some CSS expressed as XML,

Prima facie, yes, I have many other XML tags (XHTML is embedded in XML) to
convert.

> then just dump the SAC  output as XML. A SAC2SAX filter would be at most
half a day's work.

Do you do such work contractually ? ;-)

> The fact
> that something as trivial as that isn't available (that I know of) shows
just
> how much interest there is in having CSS expressed as XML.

One may even wonder why SAC exist !

> Once you have the XML, you can run XSLT on it to your heart's content. It
> doesn't need to be standardised, very few things do.

I thought the elements in this solution: XML and XSLT were standards.

Thanks for the SAC link, though.

P. A.
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Received on Wednesday, 10 July 2002 12:26:48 UTC