Style Sheets Execution Time

To the XML editors,

I confess I haven't read this whole specification, however I am
concerned witht the use of .CSS files today and possibly, therefore,
with the use of XSL. When I use Framemaker to generate XSL and .CSS
files, if I have a large number of style
definitions, it can generate a file as large as 100 pages.

The problem I detected was that web pages that used to take 5 seconds to
come
up began taking up to 5 minutes to come up.  This seem to be due to the
fact that
the .CSS files are being processed at view-time.  Therefore, each time
Netscape goes to display a new window, it also must process the .CSS
file.  As a result, I don't use .CSS files.

My concern, that I'm relaying to you, is that the idea of processing the
.CSS file
at view-time is absurd!  I hope in your design of the XSL
specifications, you can
ensure that the view-time performance will not be degraded.  This may
mean that
you need to allow for the "style sheet" definitions to be resolved, and
converted to
their HTML (or XML) equivalents during the preparation of one's HTML.
Then, at view-time, their are not style sheets to worry about.

I don't know if this has been a problem for other folks, but it
certainly was for me.
I know this is related to the number of paragraph and character styles
that I define,
but if this is so, then someone needs to do some measurements to
determine what
number of tags we should should restrict ourselves to to avoid
performance probelms when we generate HTML/XML.

Regards,

Ernie Baumbach

Received on Friday, 17 September 1999 10:16:42 UTC