Hyphenation for multipart attribute labels...

[Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx]

Hi.

Before XSL goes out the door, might we consider a small but potentialy
highly significant aspect that seem to be overlooked.

For FO attributes the convention seems to hyphenate attributes of multiple
words....

*** Heyphenating multiple words is the work of the Devil ***

...Sorry. A bit reactionary maybe, but I had to get that off my chest,
after some experimenting I was doing last night.

Hyphenated words are problematic from most scripting languages. So if I
have <tag an-attribute="something" /> then we are locked into having to
using XML DOM type approaches of elObj.getAttribute('an-attibute') or
elObj.attributes.getNamedItem('an-attribute') rather than just
elObj.anAttribute. Now in the purly XML world it's all well and reasonable
to shout "do it the proper way" and use .getAttribute(), but with XSL FOs,
we're going to have an awful lot of attributes for FOs, and in an ideal
world we're going to get some sort of dynamic rendering maniplulation of
FOs in a browser, along the lines of CSS at the mo. So we're going to want
(I maybe I should restrict this to *I*) something like...

blockObj.backgroundColor

...or maybe a browser might expose...

blockObj.xStyle.backgroundColor

...which is doubly desirable when one considers that XSL will probably
co-exist along side CSS in many cases, and it would be nice to be working
with a common paradigm.

Has anybody else given this any thought? The reason why I'm thinking about
it at the mo is because I started working up some code for basic
implimentations of XSL FOs using IE5 HTCs to impliment their instantiation
and behaviour, and at the moment I am mirroring the FO properties so that
backgound-color is also available as backgroundColor to facilitate dHTML
(or should that be dFO :) and I'd be interested to hear other peoples
thoughts on the matter.

I know we'e stuck with the W3C DOM (::split::), and I'm not arguing that we
change it, simply that we consider changing the XSL FO attributes before
they go out the door.

Cheers
     Guy Murphy
     guy_murphy@xxxxxxxxxx
     http://www.guy-murphy.easynet.co.uk



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