RE: CSS in XML format ?

> > 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.

The length of a string is irrelevant. The number of times you look for the
end of a string is important; this could also be read as reading a tree
structure that has been serialised as a string is evil, as you're doing a
lot of excess string manipulation.

There's a much more readable version of my argument at:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html

> > 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.

But the libraries/tools for CSS pre exist XML (although you could argue that
generic SGML parsers could do the job)

> > 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 ?).

So? You're not authoring for browsers? You're also suggesting something
similar to XSL-FO (which nobody supports because we already have CSS)

At the end of the day, we sit in two different schools of thought, me with
the XML for data only; and you in the XML for everything.

Received on Thursday, 11 July 2002 10:18:13 UTC