- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 00:03:21 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-style@w3.org
> > <layout> > <vblock> > <item src="body div.header" /> What you have here is a relative of XSLT, not so much of CSS, although it uses CSS selectors instead of XPATH. It is a new style sheet language. Actually, it isn't really a style sheet language, as it doesn't seem to allow general rules to be defined, whereas a true style sheet encapsulates a house style policy, not the rendering of a particular document. An alternative, which to me better fits the way that commercial web pages are designed, is the tagged PDF model, where the primary document is explicitly rendering oriented, and the parallel document that selects bits of the primary document is the structural document (tagged PDF inlines the structural information where the structure doesn't conflict with the rendering). (However, I think that a document with real content should always be designed first for structure.) One does have to ask the question as to why XSL is a low priority for browsers. I suspect that answer is that the minimum useful XSLT "style sheet" is much bigger, and more mathematical, than the mininal CSS styling (especially given that you can (though shouldn't) simulate (deprecated) font elements with span and inline styles. Other reasons are that XSL is not intended for incremental rendering or dynamic re-rendering. > 6) Content can be presented in a different order than it is in source. One of the main features of XSLT and why this language is a relative.
Received on Wednesday, 29 June 2005 23:16:59 UTC