Re: Is XHTML a dead end?

On Fri, 2002-10-04 at 12:53, Jeni Tennison wrote:

> > Right. The approach I outlined only works because HLink is described
> > in terms of elements and attributes. If it switched to a CSS-like
> > syntax, as has been discussed on xml-dev if not here, it would be
> > much, much harder to address with XSLT.
> 
> I guess there are ways around it -- build some XSLT automatically
> based on the HLink spec or something. Or there's always the
> possibility of using extension functions.

The projects in this area don't seem to progress very fast, but I don't
see any technical impossibility to reconciliate CSS and XML!

The issues to solve would be on two independent levels:

1) Syntax: it doesn't seem like a big deal to finalize a XML
serialization for CSS and to write CSS parsers which would expose CSS as
a XML tree.

2) Semantic: that maybe more problematic, but XPath extension functions
to evaluate CSS selectors would be a great thing to have. They could
include features to select a nodelist given a CSS selector and to check
if a node matches a CSS selector.

With such a tool box, a XSLT stylesheet to process a CSS syntax for
HLink would be very similar than the ones we've seen up to now.

Seen from 30000 feet, this doesn't seem to be technically blocking and
would be usefull for many other applications!

Eric
-- 
Rendez-vous a Paris (Forum XML).
                          http://www.technoforum.fr/integ2002/index.html
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 07:27:59 UTC