- From: Manos Batsis <m.batsis@bsnet.gr>
- Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 16:26:27 +0300
- To: "Patrick Andries" <pandries@iti.qc.ca>
- Cc: <www-style@w3.org>
> From: Patrick Andries [mailto:pandries@iti.qc.ca] > Yes, yes. This is why XML and XHTML has been rejected by all > B2B and B2C > applications : those tags are just too long (<TABLE COLSPAN=" > " where <T1 > C2=" could be sufficient). No it wouldn't: "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear." ... Since XML docs are supposed to be easily understood by humans and machines alike. Verbosity is explicitly a non-issue. > Which only proves (with the fact that someone has developed > SAC) that other > people want to convert CSS. > Why should everyone redo this job > (write his > parser) when, if CSS could be expressed as XML, the parsing > could be done > with the same W3C standard used to interpret the accompanying XHTML ? Not sure if I understand you correctly; SAC [1] is an API, not a program and it certainly did not have the "conversion of CSS" as it's main aim. SAC is for CSS what DOM is to XML. Anyway, if CSS had the initial form of an XML vocabulary, it would surely enjoy less support than it does today. What you are asking for (CSS in XML) exists and is called XSL-FO[2], an "XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics". You can use XSL(-FO) as your initial format to produce anything else from XHTML to PDF. The level of presentation information CSS carries is directly dependant on either the selector of element that holds the htm:style attribute. Promoting such an attribute to a (sub) tree damages the original hierarchy (thus the semantics of the document), unless you convert the XHTML elements as well for consistency. So what you have to build is an XSLT that will translate XHTML to XSL-FO (which might be a great idea actually). It certainly is possible, since you have to deal with a finite set as input (XHTML elements and their attributes) that need to be mapped to XSL. The more I think about it, the more I like it. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SAC/ [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/ Regards, Manos
Received on Thursday, 11 July 2002 09:26:08 UTC