Re: Printing a Book with CSS

Andrew Fedoniouk schreef:
> In any case TOC generation by itself *is a transformation*
> of original document so changes are acceptable here (my guess).
> html is:
>   

Well, in practice TOC generation may be done by a transformation, but 
that 1. doesn’t mean that it’s correct to have the final HTML after the 
transformation be cluttered with tags which are there solely for styling 
purposes, and 2. TOC generation by transformation would be practical, 
but is in no way a requirement.

> <li>A short title<a class="tocnumber" /></a></li>
>   

There’s still additional markup. And I don’t see the point in having an 
empty hyperlink without href target. If a <span> is what you mean, then 
just write <span> :). It is better to express no semantics than 
semantics that aren’t there, if you ask me.

> The idea here is simple.  %% units can cover many holes including
> this one. Inventing special CSS attribute for each particular
> case is just not a good design practice. Don't
> forget that number of defined attributes in CSS is
> increasing computational complexity of style resolution.
>   

Actually, I think it’s better that if you want to have a ‘leader’, 
something that is commonly used in print, it’s better to have a 
functionality for it that’s right then put it like ‘well if you do this 
and that then you can mimick it’. That’s just trickery like we use all 
to often right now. It falls in the same category as using floats and 
margins to establish page layouts with columns.

Additionally, your particular example doesn’t solve anything. The dots 
are way too low and not aligned with the text, because they’re a border. 
And even though in your example the dashes of each line are aligned with 
eachother (apparantly your engine does that), there is no requirement on 
dashed borders that the dashes for different borders are aligned like so.

It’s nice to show that it works, somewhat, however it’s not really of 
practical value and this example actually *demonstrates* that it is 
indeed desirable to have a functionality specifically for this purpose 
(the exact opposite of what you meant to do :)).


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.

Received on Wednesday, 30 November 2005 18:43:15 UTC