Re: [xsl] Prince XML vs Docbook

["Eliot Kimber ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was not aware (or hadn't remembered) the syntax for namespace-aware
selectors. But I still maintain that trying to style arbitrary XML with CSS is
a losing proposition. For most doctypes you'd have to reorder elements and add
elements to support CSS anyway, so you might as well just transform to HTML
and make it much easier on the CSS developer, who can then use their existing
how-to-style-HTML knowledge.

Leigh's book should not be $168.00 on Amazon--it's $35.95 on the publisher's
site: http://xmlpress.net/publications/dita/dita-for-print/ It's definitely
saved me way more than $36.00 worth of time...

I'm not sure how flex and grid help for pagination. I initially thought that
but then Tony Graham asked me how I saw that working and I couldn't think of
anything that would actually help. But I can't claim to have thought about it
deeply.

Cheers,

E.

--
Eliot Kimber
http://contrext.com


o;?On 1/18/18, 3:02 PM, "Liam R. E. Quin liam@xxxxxx"
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

    On Thu, 2018-01-18 at 18:15 +0000, Eliot Kimber ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx
    wrote:
    > I would disagree with your assessment that CSS pagination is not
    > easier than FO *if* there was appropriate how-to guidance available.

    We did a poor job (collectively) at tutorials and outreach for XML
    technology, both at W3C and in the wider community, and we now pay a
    price for that.

    > It would also help to have a less-like facility that could be easily
    > used with XSLT

    It's not too hard to implement (non-cascading) CSS custom properties
    ("variables") in XSLT, with a simple XML document to give the values.

    > Granted, working out the details of how to translate your source into
    > appropriate pages is inherently challenging.

    Yes - the syntax is (by and large) the easy part, although as with any
    batch formatting system, getting page numbers and headers under control
    can be a challenge.

    > But I think CSS's way of capturing the design details as
    > implementation artifacts is much more accessible to designers than
    > XSL-FO page masters and page sequence masters. With some appropriate
    > templating of page rules it could be pretty easy to define and
    > maintain.

    Yes, especially with flex and grid now in all major browsers.

    > Another practical issue, and one that should not be underestimated,
    > is the need to synthesize elements in source content to enable
    > generation of running headers and footers (more generally, any edge
    > region content).
    >
    > Because of the way CSS works you can't have an element that both
    > contributes its structured content to an edge region and is shown in
    > the main flow.

    This isn't entirely true, as you can use content: element(#foo) to
    reuse an element, but yes, only as a string value.

    > The XSLT+CSS approach separates the details of what *content* goes in
    > the running heads and the styling details (where it appears on the
    > page and how it's formatted in that context).
    >
    > Note also that for CSS pagination to work well the input really needs
    > to be HTML, not arbitrary XML. While CSS can, in theory, be applied
    > to arbitrary XML, in practice it doesn't really work, for a number of
    > reasons, not least of which is CSS's lack of support for namespace-
    > aware selection.

    CSS has namespace-aware selectors and has had for many years. It's in
    CSS 2.1 iirc.

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@namespace

    You have to use | rather than colon, as CSS usd : for something else,
    so you end up with
    @namespace h url(http://example.org/ns/hosiery)
    and then using
    h|sock { color: black; }


    > Leigh White's DITA for Print book serves as an excellent example of a
    > comprehensive how-to guide to doing complex pagination with non-
    > obvious technology from sophisticated XML source.
    Yay, and it's $165.93 on Amazon. I'll take ten... :) i found a PDF
    extract, looks like it might be very interesting

    > If we had a comparable book for CSS pagination I think most people
    > tasked with applying CSS for pagination would be able to be
    > productive with a minimum of pain.
    >
    > The challenge of course is finding someone to write such a book (and
    > keep it up to date as the technology evolves)....

    Maybe if i retire and am independently wealthy :)

    In the meantime see e.g. Rachel Andrew's book on flex and grid to get a
    feel for where things might be going -
    http://amzn.to/2rjY7oL [referrer link, make me rich!]

    Liam

    --
    Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
    Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG

    Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/