Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Rely on CSS?

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>]

At 13:39 2003 01 21 +0100, Stefan Priebsch (>e-novative>) wrote:
>To me, external CSS is an avantage since
>
> - it makes my HTML more compact and more readable
> - it (more) clearly separates the content/presentation
> - it allows me to easily hook up a document "somewhere else", and
>   make it appear in another CI or Style

And it means you can no longer just send a single file to some
recipient and have them view the result in a browser.  You have
to solve the packaging problem.  Granted, you have to do this
whenever you have a graphic in your document too, but having an
external style file does add some complexity.

>It seems that putting CSS formatting commands into the HTML is just
>another variant of using deprecated stuff like the FONT tag.

Right--so what?  We're talking about the case where the source
is DocBook XML.  We're using HTML as the "PDF of the Web".

I'm exaggerating a bit (I like clean HTML too), but the point
is still there.  Using some embedded CSS seems perfectly reasonable
when you're creating output (as opposed to the authoritative source).

>Isn't talking about CSS scrambled into the HTML just throwing away the
>biggest advantages CSS and HTML together offer?

I'd say our advantages accrue from the fact that we are using DocBook
XML for our source.  The CSS+HTML is the output, not the source.  As
output, its raison d'etre is to present well.  (Yes, this includes
being accessible, but use of the style attribute doesn't prevent this.)

paul