[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML and CSS
On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 03:34:08PM +0100, Jesper Tverskov wrote: > I don't thing that is the full explanation. When looking back, I find > it incredible to believe, that many of us once thought that "XML > Browsing", meaning CSS styled homegrown XML, was a promising road to > follow for webpages. Some of us were hoping for adoption of a more sophisticated styling mechanism, such as (what became) XSL-FO. Unfortunately, it's clear that, even if there were Web browsers implementing XSL-FO, it's too difficult for the target audience in the Web design world to use. Generating (X)HTML seems to me to be the primary way forward for the Web. Some XML editing environments (XMetal, XXE, etc) use CSS for styles, or at least something CSS-like, usually without the cascading part. I only know of one editor (Serna, now with a useable open source version) that uses XSL-FO for screen display: it was a much harder technical challenge. I always thought the real goal was to be able to get fairly arbitrary SGML (or, later, XLM) to display in the Web browser - originally using a browser plugin such as SoftQuad Panorama or EBT DynaWeb. I for one never expected CSS to be widely used for XML, since (1) the cascading part didn't seem relevent in most cases, and (2) CSS didn't really seem sophisticated enough for most "serious" publishing use cases. I don't think that's a weakness of CSS - arbritary XML documents are well outside its design, is all. Jesper, your tutorial is almost like an advert for Prince, you could at least include a link to e.g. FOP :-) You also ask, Why has XML browsing turned out to be a dead end? and "answer" it with, It makes more sense to use XHTML, but, XHTML is based on XML, so in fact XML browsing is far from a dead end. What is not so widely done is browsing of XML vocabularies that are not built-in to the most common Web browsers. For that, as Simon has pointed out, XLink's failure is a problem. And a large part of its failure is that it never addressed the "link discovery" or "architectural form" part of its requirements. Some simple markup such as, <?xlink element="person" link="@brother" title=" 'My Brother' " ?> <?xlink element="person" link="concat('?ssn=', @ssn)" title="name" ?> would have gone a long way to changing the world. You have to look at the whole picture -- search engines, text readers, javascript, links, forms, styles for screen and for printing, navigation... Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
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