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

["Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@globalsymmetry.com>]

On Friday 11 November 2005 08:57 pm, Scott L. Holmes wrote:

> Based on my research of the xhtml 1.x specs,
> xhtml rendering is firstly an xml parsing
> process. I'm pretty sure that these browsers are
> all proto-xml rendering engines at their core -
> each with their own set of capabilities.

I know that Netscape and IE are both derivatives of Mosaic.  The biggest 
difference that I am aware of that existed at about the time the Mosilla 
project got started is the event model.  One was bubble up, and the other was 
trickle down, or something like that.  Basically it had to do with the way 
events such as a mouse click were propagated through the document object 
tree. 

> The technological achievement of modern browsers
> (IE included) is positively astonishing. The
> layers and layers of functionality is undeniably
> some of the finest software engineering yet
> devised. I would hardly call any of them "crappy
> browsers.” Any organization that even attempts
> to implement the w3 box model has my deepest
> respect (and sympathy - poor buggers).

Have a look at MathML.


> One attractor for docbook is its clear emphasis
> on semantic markup making it an ideal dialect for
> sourcing other documents. What I believe would be
> useful is an interim dialect (xhtml basic or even
> xhtml 2.0) that is not necessarily intended to be
> rendered in a user agent. Then the problem domain
> of the user agent would be vastly easier to
> subsume.

I don't quite follow.  The biggest problem with serving XML that I encountered 
years back was getting links to work.  I found ways to do it, but they 
weren't overly satisfying.  The browsers already have the core capability, 
all that is required is making it work for a larger class of XML than just 
XHTML.

Steven