[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Why I dislike CSS
The idea that whatever we work with in the text languages of an XML system should be XML is an attractive one, loosely called, wall-to-wall. I like it but it seldom has been implemented. CSS is serving a role, it is fielded, it has been learned, so flogging it won't get far. One won't get a streamlined system for wall-to-wall systems from a committee. Scarlett and The Kindness of Strangers: you may want to look up A Streetcar Named Desire for a character named Blanche DuBois. Scully and Mulder: sorry about that. It's hard to conceive of anyone not seeing this but I'd not seen XWeb either. Alien mind control wasn't the point; superstition promoted by trendy yet undefined terms in soundbyte-like goals was. The short simple goals that have been used for some projects don't work because they obscure the conflicts with other projects, mask the goals to intentionally pursue those conflicts, and in short, do work out to a form of mind control, I guess. You have a goal: XMLOnly. Others don't share it. I do but have already bent my ageing fangs on it. Most of the responses so far have not been flames but attempts to sharpen these goals in terms of past experience with FO and FO-like constructs. Again, even with over a decade of work in the attempt to build this stylesheet system, it is still contentious and still being questioned as to its applicability. Unless it really is intended to be the uberStyleSpecToReplaceAllOthers (whichs gives it a .00001 chance of adoption), don't use broad windy goals. Be very specific. It is good to remember that the origins of markup technology lay in attempts to solve this exact problem. See Gencoding. Len Bullard Intergraph Public Safety clbullar@i... http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Amy Lewis [mailto:amyzing@t...] Sent: Sunday, June 18, 2000 12:28 PM To: xml-dev@x... Subject: Why I dislike CSS Because it ain't XML. In a few responses in the FOs thread, it's been made clear that XSL FO is intended as a high-performance page description language; reading the list of working group members' affiliations makes it clear that this is where the expertise (and hence the focus) is going to be. The suggested alternative for a simple presentation language has been CSS. I don't like CSS. I learned back-when, and still can't use it, because it isn't supported well. I believe that CSS is a dead end. That's fairly tendentious, I suppose, but I have some reason to say it. It isn't an XML language, so it provides no leverage of existing familiarity with tag-oriented markup languages. Instead, it has the flavor of client-side scripting language. Worse, from the point of view of implementation, developers can't leverage the XML and XSLT parsers that they may already have implemented; CSS requires an additional engine. My main reason for calling it a "dead end," though, is that because it isn't XML, it has to be "last in the chain". Using stylesheets, it has its own selection language that has nothing to do with XPath, and is supposed to be delivered directly to the rendering engine. If I combine XSLT and CSS, I end up with an XML document in which the styling is all encoded in the single attribute "style", and if I want to transform it any further, I have a significant parsing challenge. I can't use my validating XML parser to verify the correctness of my stylesheet; I have to have something that understands CSS. I want a stylesheet language that lets me leverage my familiarity with XML syntax, and lets me reuse the tools that I already have for coping with tag-oriented, tree-oriented languages. CSS isn't "part of the family." I realize that the W3C continues to develop CSS, and that a part of the reason for the focus of the XSL WG is probably so that it doesn't conflict with that ongoing work. I realize that, after W3C has spent *years* flogging this technology, it's likely to be embarrassed at the prospect of abandoning it. But I *really* dislike being forced to use CSS, and only barely refrained from titling this "CSS considered harmful," which is probably just too over-the-top. So, XSLFO ... sheesh. I agree with the need to be able to print high-quality output. As a matter of fact, I think that the ability to print barely-acceptable output would be an enormous advance over the current situation. However, in my last-but-one job, the testers had an irritating habit of applying the "mom and pop" test. That is, they would ask "could a mom-and-pop shop (Ma and Pa Kettle's Online Special Recipe Depot) use this software". XSL FO fails the test, in my opinion. It's software that makes the user into Scarlett, always depending on the kindness of strangers (who will develop the interactive tools that will allow one to actually use the language, since it's so large and variegated--over fifty elements, over two hundred attributes that relate to those elements--that it isn't likely to be easily learned). I don't want to deprecate the work of the XSL FO committee. I just don't see that it's going to meet my needs, judging both from the current draft and from the focus of the comments expressed here in the last week or two. That leaves me with basically nothing, if I want to go out and help Ma&Pa join the electronic revolution, using the vertical market schemas for communicating with vendors of mash, pipe, and glassware, and their own custom inventory/order language that's intended to interact with humans hitting their site. There isn't anything that meets my needs, because CSS isn't XML, and XSLFO is neither finished nor suitably compact (I seriously doubt that there will be much stylesheet generation using XSLFO without the aid of a software tool; I happen to still like using text editors for generating this stuff). My printed order forms don't *need* that level of control; my online presentation is completely overwhelmed by that level of complexity. Perhaps the XSLFO folks could produce a "core" outline, or follow the lead of the schema folks and do a tutorial ... but it isn't the focus now, and given the need to not appear to be trying to undermine CSS, it probably won't be in the future. I don't mind undermining CSS, though. So, drawing on material from CSS & XSLFO, and from XLink, XSLT, XPointer, and XPath, I've put up a really quick pass at a layout vocabulary for XML, at http://www.mindspring.com/~alicorn/xslv.txt It may be that, in my dislike for CSS and disappointment with XSLFO, I'm part of a vanishingly small minority, so that there's no point in doing this. If so, I'll shut up after this. If there's interest, drop me a line, and I can expand on the admittedly sketchy material that's currently there (if you can't get to the doc using the above URL, then try it - .txt + .html; that will mean I've revised it to pretty-print, and there's been some level of positive response). One last request: if you're going to flame me based on popular-cultural icons, could you try to explain some of the referents? I haven't watched network television for something like twenty years. I gather that Scully and Mulder are actors in a television show about alien mind control, that has an X in its name, and that this was prompted by the abbreviation "first generation Xweb." That phrase made sense to me as an abbreviation of "first generation XML-based web," which in turn might stand for "initial stages of the transformation to a network information infrastructure relying on XML over HTTP for content and data delivery." I'm not quite sure where the alien mind control comes in there (as opposed to XPointer, XML, XPath, XSL, Xthis, Xthat, and Xtheother), although there does seem to be a mind-reading markup language referenced from the Cover pages. On the other hand, my friends seemed to get a kick out of trying to explain this to me, but I'm afraid there may have been more noise than signal in the channel. If it matters, I wasn't suggesting some sort of mind control web (that wasn't being suggested, really, was it?). Amy! Amy! -- Amelia A. Lewis alicorn@m... amyzing@t... I stopped by the bar at 3 a.m. to seek solace in a bottle, or possibly a friend. I woke up with a headache like my head against a board, twice as cloudy as I'd been the night before. I went in seeking clarity. -- Indigo Girls *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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