Re: declare-initial-value

[Jon.Bosak@xxxxxxxxxxx (Jon Bosak)]

[Paul Prescod:]

| It is common in our contemporary DSSSL style sheets to do something like
| this:
| 
|        top-margin: *top-margin*
|        bottom-margin: *bottom-margin*
|        left-margin: *left-right-margin*
|        right-margin: *left-right-margin*
|        header-margin: *header-margin*
|        footer-margin: *footer-margin*
|        page-width: *page-width*
|        page-height: *page-height*
| 
| Where these are defined above.

I think that some people are copying derivatives of my old HTML and
DocBook style sheets, and if so, I am largely to blame for this habit.

| I would (mildly) prefer if we used the DSSSL feature that allows
| inherited characteristics to be declared like this:
| 
| (declare-initial-value writing-mode 'left-to-right)
| (declare-initial-value font-size 12pt)
| (declare-initial-value line-spacing 14pt)
| (declare-initial-value font-family "iso-serif")

Yes, this is obviously the better way to go in most cases.

The existence of widely mirrored bad examples is a bit of a problem.
We went through something like this with HTML, didn't we?  Fortunately
DSSSL is in no danger of being carried away by hordes of the clueless,
and we can fix the problem by putting cleaner versions up on
sunsite.unc.edu and letting them propagate through its mirror sites.
I thank Norm Walsh for taking over the DocBook style sheet; hopefully
one of the wizards on this list will step up and take over the HTML
style sheet.  If I had the time to look after these, I would have
fixed this (and a lot of other weird cruft) a long time ago.

Jon




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