Re: Announcement

[Chris Lilley <chris@xxxxxx>]

Didier PH Martin wrote:

> - Full XML support. If a document includes a style sheet PI in the XML
> document will be associated to the correct style sheet for the following
> styles: CSS, XSL and DSSSL. 
Great

> If you have IE 5.x beta installed, the Microsoft
> CSS and XSL engine will process the document and display it in the browser.

This implies that it uses the earlier form of the pi - xml:stylesheet.
The later form is xml-stylesheet (which is what NGlayout uses, for
example).Newer code releases if IE will presumably be migrating to the
latest syntax.


> Jade engine will process the XML document with DSSSL styles. We followed the
> latest W3 recommendations about style sheets PI but got to add a new
> property because, the actual spec is limited to HTML display 

erm .. no, it isn't restricted to HTML; in fact it says nothing about
HTML at all.

> and do not
> include other kind of renderer. 

Ah I see, you mean the intermediate stage which some implementations use
(to push off the actual formatting to yet another step in the process)

> We added the "format" property so, for DSSSL
> styles you can select from the PI the output format.

Have you suggested this to the XSL group? One problem with it is that it
becomes impossible to write a stylesheet link that is generic; that does
not make assumptions about the style sheet processor. Your three
examples below are clearly targetted at Jade. Suppose someone has a
different processor? Suppose there are three or four different
processors - does the document author need to write multiple
stylesheets, one for each processor?

Irt would be better to have a processor-independent, format-independent,
portable and machine-readable description of what formatting was
intended. That is what FOs are.

> example:
> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/dsssl" href="../myScript.dsl" format="rtf"?>
> output is RTF and can be displayed in IE browser with the Word viewer or
> word itself.

OK (the authoritative specification for RTF is where?)

> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/dsssl" href="../myScript.dsl" format="sgml"?>
> The output is HTML tags and displayed in the browser. This format gives you
> a lot of latitude.

And very little control over the formatting.

> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/dsssl" href="../myscript.dsl" format="html"?>
> uses the experimental HTML FOs, still incomplete, but we are working on it
> and we implement new FOs.

Are you referring to the XSL FOs or to something else entirely. XSL FOs
have no relation to HTML at all.

> for XSL and CSS you cannot use the new stylesheet PI, use the previous one
> example:
> <?xml:stylesheet type="text/css" href="../myscript.xsl" ?> in that case, you
> don't have the format property because only HTML is supported.

You seem to be equating 'HTML' with 'you see something on screen'. I
don't see how applying a CSS stylesheet to XML to directly produce
rendered output (something that both IE5b2 and NGLayout can do, among
others such as MultiDocZilla and XMetal) involves HTML at any stage.

Anyway these are minor comments, easily fixed, and i am glad to see the
SGMLKit being updated.

--
Chris


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