Re: CSS in XML format ?

----- Message d'origine -----
De: "Rowland Shaw" <Rowland.Shaw@crystaldecisions.com>

> > > Not being sentient (just yet), I'm sure they don't actually care, but
> > > their users will, as you're hopefully aware, string manipulation,
> > > particularly with C style strings (and other kinds of byte streams, eg
> > > stuff coming over a network) is hideously inefficient.
> > 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).
>
> I think you've misunderstood what I meant; If you have a string, how do
you
> append to it? First you need to count the length of the string, before you
> can copy onto the end (etc).

This is a C problem (for instance).
I think I did understand : those optimization issues are relatively
unimportant as the success of verbose standards like XML and XHTML attests.

> SAC is just a library (or API) as I understand it, so it's on a par with
all
> the XML parsers out there; so SAC is not an application purely for
> generating XML, but instead a library for interpreting CSS -- which
> undermines your argument;
> SAC being created for interpreting CSS, not for porting it to XML.

No people want to parse CSS and then write a tool; were CSS expressed in XML
no such new tool(s) would be necessary in most cases (XSLT would do the
job). Also CSS being embedded in XHTML, people wanting to transform this
XHTML will most probably use the W3C standard called XSLT.

> By the way, is XSL-FO a close enough port of CSS to XMLisms for you?

Let's say; browsers don't understand it (yet ?).

I think this thread has been long enough, you like CSS as it is : terse. Too
bad if it can't be automatically processed by the same standard used to
transfom XML (and XHTML) documents.

Thanks and bye.

P. A.

Received on Thursday, 11 July 2002 09:53:59 UTC