Re: [docbook] Whatever happened too CSS+XML?

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Steven T. Hatton wrote:

>> * it lacks a TOC
> 
> Create an XML: TOC http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/toc.html
> 
> 
>> * it lacks indexes
> 
> 
> Create an XML index: http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/index.html
> 
> 
>> * certain elements need complicated prefixes and postfixes (including
>>text, graphics, borders, table-like structures)
> 
> 
> Most of that /can/ be done with CSS.  CSS and JavaScript can do even more.  
> Basically all a web browser does with xhtml is apply a built in CSS style. 

Well this is true only if you are styling content stored in some very 
general vocabulary as DocBook or XHTML, because those languages has very 
loose schema and allow you to augment original document with new 
elements containing things like ToC or index. CSS is sufficient for 
styling such document if you can use XSLT, JavaScript or whatever to add 
missing pieces like ToC or index to document prior to rendering.

However if you have some very restrictive XML vocabulary, for example 
XML invoice, you can't style it without prior transformation to 
something like XHTML, DocBook or XSL-FO. Because this vocabulary doesn't 
provide any generalized markup for adding new stuff, you can't do things 
like adding header row before the list of items. There is simly no 
element in XML invoice which can hold header information and CSS is 
unable to generate new header row on-the-fly during rendering.

This remainds me, that I recently promised to send to Håkon some 
examples like this which can't be handled without downcorvesion to some 
loose markup like XHTML or XSL-FO.

					Jirka

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   Jirka Kosek     e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz     http://www.kosek.cz
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