Potential new TAG issue: Content Selection for Device Independence (DISelect) 1.0

Content Selection for Device Independence (DISelect) 1.0 is now in last 
call. You can find the draft here:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-cselection-20050502/

It seems to me that this spec massively violates section 4.3 of the 
Architecture of the World Wide Web, "Separation of Content, 
Presentation, and Interaction". Briefly this new spec suggests mixing 
attributes and elements that select content based on device capabilities 
directly into the page markup. That is, you do not provide separate 
stylesheets for PDAs, TVs, print, and so forth. Instead the document 
itself contains markup like the following:

<div sel:expr="dc:cssmq-width('px') &gt; 500"
     & dc:cssmq-color() > 0" >
   <object src="cat.png"/>
</div>

This says that the picture cat.jpg should be shown but only if the 
device is color and has more than 500 pixels width. I have no particular 
objection to writing stylesheets that tailor the display of content to 
particular device profiles. Possibly a new stylesheet language is needed 
to enable this.

My concern is that the current approach makes the details tailored to 
each device profile part of the document itself, rather than in a 
separate stylesheet.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

Received on Thursday, 5 May 2005 15:18:23 UTC