Re: Will behaviors be added to CSS?

>> > I usually refer to the work on behaviors in CSS as "dormant." There
>> > is no new draft in sight, but no formal decision to abandon it
>> > either. If a compelling idea comes up (and somebody to champion it),
>> > it may yet wake up.
>> And how about CSS linking extensions implemented in Opera? These
>> extensions  seem to be very useful and provide very flexible linking
>> mechanism for XML  documents. It would be nice if they will be
>> included in CSS3.
> However, there is the question of what to do with documents in a
> format that the browser doesn't know. If it is an XML-based format and
> it has a style sheet, it makes sense to display it as best you can. The
> browser may not know what else to do with it, but maybe the human
> reader can get some sense from it. It would be nice if the document not
> only displayed reasonably, but also had links that worked, at
> least as far as images and hyperlinks are concerned. If it has XLink
> attributes, you could use those. But if it has not, it would be rather
> convenient if something like Opera's CLinks could simply be added to
> the style sheet.
Exactly, XLink may not always fit well in general scope of XML document and 
it's useful to have some external control for linking functionality. 
Something like
<?xml-stylesheet href="linksheet.hlink" type="text/hlink+xml"?>
PI is also OK, but it would be nice to have hlink functionality
in CSS in this case no new PI are required and one can easily change 
navigation system on site by applying alternate style sheet (it seems to be 
the most flexible solution). Of course this is not necessary in XHTML where 
CSS is mostly used for styling documents but in case of XML it becomes 
rendering language and its importance and potential should not be 
underestimated.
> In terms of separating style and structure, putting such properties in
> CSS is not ideal. A separate "link sheet" would be cleaner. In terms of
> convenience on the other hand, not much can beat CLink-like
> properties.
Agree but CLink's flexibility is temptating.
> HLink[4] is a language propsoed by the HTML WG. It can be used as the
> "link sheet" language that I mentioned above. It lists all elements
> that can be links and says what kind of link they are. At the moment it
> is not clear how to use HLink with other formats than XHTML and
> extensions of XHTML. Maybe the same style PI and HTTP header could be
> used for as for style sheets:
>   XML:
>     <?xml-stylesheet href="linksheet.hlink" type="text/hlink+xml"?>
>   HTTP:
>     Link: <http://example.org/linksheet.hlink>; rel="stylesheet"
> The definition of the A element in HTML could look like this in HLink:
>     <hlink namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
>       element="a"
>       locator="@href" />
> It's not CSS, but it's not too ugly... :-) 
It's OK but less convenient
> I guess you can omit the
> "namespace" attribute if there is only one kind of "a" in your
> document. 
Currently "namespace" is required attribute, it will be useful if it could 
be omitted. 

Thanks for comprehensive reply.

Received on Thursday, 24 July 2003 15:12:03 UTC