Re: CSS and XSL?

Subject: Re: CSS and XSL?
From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:34:37 -0400
The perils of exploring what might have been...

At 11:03 AM 6/10/99 -0400, Didier PH Martin wrote:
>Recent comments on CSS and XSL made me think a bit. I simply checked again
>what XSL means:
>
>Extensible Stylesheet Language... Have you noticed the word extensible in
>the name?
>
>This said, did someone have read this note. And what is your opinion on
>this?
>
>http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XSL-and-CSS
>
>After having heard about the thesis and the antithesis what about the
>synthesis?

I've been wondering this for a very long time.  That Note seems to have
been an early attempt at synthesis, proposing a merging of the efforts of
CSS and XSL rather than the strange competition we've had.  Unfortunately,
that note doesn't seem to have had much impact.

It seems like the W3C could have avoided this split and the crazy debates
that have followed it by making XSL and CSS work together, not separately.
If XSL is in fact a superset of CSS functionality, why was it so difficult
to describe that functionality starting from what's available in CSS and
extending it?  Transformations may necessary in some cases, but why
completely ignore the long-standing Web practice of document composition?
Why not let developers use the same vocabulary for describing formatting
applied by annotation and applied by transformation into formatting objects?

The divergence may have pleased folks who wanted to start all over again
with the tools they understood well (DSSSL primarily, it seems) and without
experience in or respect for the CSS line of development.  The rest of us,
it seems, just get stuck with two very different tools that didn't have to
be so different.  The claim that XSL and CSS "don't compete" is a tiny fig
leaf covering up the fact that they didn't need to be so different.

Is it too late to fix this?  I hope not.  It would require changes to XSL's
formatting object vocabulary, and extensions to CSS, but it doesn't seem
like it should be impossible.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical (July)
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com


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