[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: CSS as XML
Thanks very much for the links to similar initiatives. I have some questions about the other approaches that I'm interested in perspectives on. Please take my comments as a line of inquiry as they are not intended to be critical in any way of other approaches. One thing I don't understand is why these approaches emulate so closely the original CSS language and syntax. It seems to me that CSS is a bit outdated and not that logically clean. If we're going to go to XML it might make more sense to restructure things a bit to take advantage of XML's strengths. For example, styling can be nicely organized by the elements being styled, such as background, text, borders, etc. This makes a really clear, simple and logical structure: <text> <color unit="rgb"/> <direction/> <line-height/> ... </text> CSS on the other hand seems to have a not entirely consistent naming convention. For example, color defines text color, but you have to know that. Border-color, border-left-color, background-color, etc. make it more clear what we're defining the color for, but why do we need define a schema for all of those different elements. Why not just define what color is, and then use it in each of the contexts, such as: <style nodeset="//div[id='@bodyText']"> <text> <color unit="hex">000000</color> </text> <border> <top> <color unit="hex">111111</color> </top> <bottom> <color unit="hex">222222</color> </bottom> </border> </style> Admittedly, if you're coding CSS by hand it takes longer to write but use a simple xform and it's way faster to code than CSS by hand! Other advantages to this structure are that it's super simple to learn and extend, you can make a really clean schema, it's machine readable and manipulable, and it's more aligned with standard xml practice. Bryan, I can see the advantages in your approach of being able to quickly define styles in only a few lines of code, such as: Your approach: <selector id="p1"> <s name="color">#ff0000</s> <s name="font">11pt Times</s> </selector> My approach: <style nodeset="*[id='p1']"> <text> <color unit="hex">ff0000</color> </text> <font> <size unit="pt">11</size> <family>times</family> </font> </style> A drawback I see is that you would have to extend by adding compound attribute values, such as background-color, border-left-color, etc. So basically all attributes are at the same level and you can't take advantage of xml's hierarchical structure to give meaning. Another issue is having multiple values defined in a single element. For instance: "11" "pt" "times". This could make it harder to parse the values automatically, it's harder to define the enumeration for allowable values and the user has to know what values can be defined in the element because it's not made explicit. A final comment is on the selector approach. It's definitely easier to borrow the current CSS selector syntax since you'll have to convert it to CSS anyway, but it misses the opportunity to progress toward the use of xpath, which is a powerful and widely used standard for everything else in xml. Xpath is also probably already more powerful than CSS selectors and definitely seems to be maturing as a language much faster than CSS. From a user point of view, if I'm using xpath for xslt, xforms, etc. I'd like to use it for CSS too. Why learn another language that does essentially the same thing? Thanks for the comments!? Fraser -----Original Message----- From: Henry S. Thompson [mailto:ht@i...] Sent: September 6, 2007 5:39 AM To: bryan rasmussen Cc: Fraser Hore; xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: CSS as XML You both might be interested in some exploratory work [1] in this space by the W3C mobileOK checker task force [2]. ht [1] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2007/cssxml/ [2] http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI/BPWG/Group/TaskForces/Checker/ -- Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh Half-time member of W3C Team 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@i... URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam] _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS to support XML implementation and development. To minimize spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l... subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l... List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
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