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Re: limits of the generic

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: limits of the generic
• From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
• Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 17:39:53 -0700
• In-reply-to: <E840F0B7E6189547BDB91DA8BF2228AB28C7A9@c...>
• References: <E840F0B7E6189547BDB91DA8BF2228AB28C7A9@c...>

Micah Dubinko wrote:

> Joe English:
> >How is blind recognition of links any more useful than
> >blind recognition of any other data type (which is to say,
> >not very)?
>
> How about a use case:
>
> I want to put, say, DocBook on the web. I can do this today and use a
> stylesheet to make it display reasonably, even though none of my browsers
> have any built in knowledge of DocBook.

By providing a stylesheet, you're _giving_ the browsers
enough knowledge of DocBook to be able to display it.
(This assumes the browser does have built-in knowledge of CSS,
XSLT+XSL-FO, XSLT+HTML, or whatever stylesheet notation you're 
using).

> I also would like the links to work.

The same kind of thing could work for links.

In the case of XSLT+HTML, that functionality is already
available -- just translate DocBook links into HTML <A>
elements.  (I think the online profile of XSL-FO includes
hyperlink flow objects; if so, it would work there too.)

For CSS, Opera supports (used to support?) CSS extensions for
specifying hyperlink behavior; not sure if those extensions have
made it into CSS 3 yet (or whatever the current version is; I
haven't kept up), or if they're ever going to, but IMO it's a darn
good idea.

We don't expect blind recognition of, say, paragraphs, headings, and 
tables to work; I still don't see why hyperlinks should be any different.


--Joe English

  jenglish@f...

• References:
  • RE: limits of the generic
    • From: Micah Dubinko <MDubinko@c...>

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