Re: Are there W3C definitions of presentation and content?

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 03:07:28PM +0200, Laurens Holst wrote:
> >Try to format XML documents with CSS.You simply can't  ignore CSS when
> >it is used to define layout, unless all elements are inline and no 
> >formatting is necessary.
> 
> In your case, the XML format *depends* on CSS to display the 
> information. That is however not necessarily the case - it is not for 
> XHTML

s/XHTML/any user agent that understands the semantics of the document/.

A DocBook UA would not need to use CSS to view (and navigate) a DocBook
document. Conversely, a generic XML+CSS UA would not be able to navigate
an XHTML document. And - as mentioned above - without the external CSS
stylesheet, there's no reason to believe that an XHTML document viewed
in an XML+CSS UA would be any more readable than any other XML document.

Since 'XML' has no semantics per se, no UA will ever be able to apply
behavioural or presentational rules to a document type that it does
not understand unless there is a way of communicating them through
another mechanism.

CSS covers that requirement for presentation (and is therefore optional,
though the document may not be very easy to read without it), but
there is currently no mechanism to communicate out-of-band behavioural
rules (though that slot is likely to be filled by sXBL/XBL2, as I
understand it).

Regards,
Malcolm

Received on Friday, 23 September 2005 13:49:09 UTC