Re: CSS Futures

David Woolley wrote:

>> On Mon, 2007-07-02 at 22:26 -0700, James Elmore wrote:
>>
>>> Further in the future, I would like the group to consider blocks 
>>> which are not rectangular. Just as one example, triangular blocks 
>>> could provide new layout 
> 
> 
> There has been much discussion of this in the SVG list, and, in my view, 
> you are so far into the presentational world at this point that you 
> should be using SVG, not HTML, if you really need this sort of 
> presentation.

I have used SVG. It requires lots of programming and is undoubtedly not suitable 
for 'designers'.

I don't know if anyone else thinks the way I seem to, but it seems to me that 
not all areas of all documents should be rectangular. I am not a designer. I 
have no need for this sort of presentation, currently, and I may never have need 
for it. I was just thinking about things which CSS *could* do in the future to 
make designers' jobs easier. If no one has any need or can imagine no need for 
this type of layout, it will undoubtedly go the way thousands of other 
suggestions have gone in the W3 world.

But, if someone can imagine a future where CSS layouts are not limited to 
rectangles and tables, I offer the idea for consideration and I will be 
interested in discussing possible problems and advantages of the idea.

> 
> Incidentally, with regard to my previous comment about the lack of a 
> structural overlay, comparable with tagged PDF, in SVG, I guess one 
> could use XSLT, for this purpose, but you wouldn't be using a language 
> optimised for the job.
> 

I found that perl works well for this sort of thing. It is easy to use for XML 
type files and can create as well as parse SVG files. It is (reasonably well) 
optimized for scanning and arranging tagged files, and might allow addition of 
(or extraction of existing) structural overlays in some documents.

-- 
James Elmore

Received on Thursday, 5 July 2007 22:08:37 UTC