Re: Status of XSL and CSS?

At 03:20 AM 4/11/99 -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
>Chris Lilley wrote:
>> 
>> Correct; and, that is a good thing.
>> 
>> The spec that describes how authors describe links of various types in
>> their document is XLink, not CSS.
>
>Fine, but the specification that describes how those links should be
>presented to the user should be a stylesheet language:
>
>"XLink does not provide mechanisms for controlling link formatting because
>it is considered to fall into the domain of stylesheets. Link behavior
>should ideally also be determined by rules based on link types, resource
>roles, user circumstances, and other factors."
>
>http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xlink#behavior

I think it is worth noting here that this attitude has been brought into
question a large number of times on the xlxp-dev mailing list and that it
may not survive to the final draft.

In addition the claim that 'how those links should be presented to the user
should be a style sheet language' only goes so far - while I'm quite
willing to let a style sheet language determine the color and underlining
of links, relying on style sheet languages to resolve resource lists to
traversable paths leaves me cold, as not all applications (see the simple
image map example on my site at
http://www.simonstl.com/projects/xlinkfilter/code.html#example for one
case) will find this appropriate.  Leaving this task to style sheets also
may lead to divergence, as CSS and XSL go their own ways and proposals
outside the W3C find yet other ways to go.

I suspect SVG - if links come from or are directed to a part of a graphic -
may be one of those cases as well.

>It is probably best for CSS to wait for XLink before defining these things
>but it is nevertheless the case that in the meantime CSS is not a very
>capable XML stylesheet language unless your document type is designed
>specifically for compatibility with CSS.

It is probably best for XSL partisans to stop taking shots at a very
capable style sheet language simply because it doesn't live up to all of
_your_ criteria.  CSS is a very capable XML stylesheet language because you
only need to provide one attribute - style - to 'design specifically for
compatibility with CSS' rather than plugging in several hundred attributes.
 We've been over this before.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Sunday, 11 April 1999 10:46:19 UTC