Re: The Future of Browser-Bound XML?

[Sebastian Rahtz]

>
> > If you take a look at the CSS2 specs on w3.org you can see
> > that the selectors can be pretty useful.
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html
> > I was actually rather shocked at some of the things you can do with it.
> > The conditionality for links is pretty cool.
>
> if it knows its a link, yes.... but that isnt any help
>
> > I don't really think that css is the hindering factor.
> > It is the browser support for it.
> its the lack of browser support for any semantics other than HTML...
>

It is more than this.  XML per se has ***no*** display semantics (nor any
other kind of intrinsic semantics beyond trees).  Given an arbitrary XML
document, there could be an indefinite but large, and perhaps infinite,
number of ways to display it.  Therefore we have to decide which ways we
want, and then find a way to indicate to the display device (browser) what
they are.

XSLT and css work well together to accomplish this.  CSS by itself can work
for some xml files, but not all by a long shot.

Cheers,

Tom P


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