Stylesheet Issues (was Re: tlug: SGML)

[Matt Gushee <matt@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:

 >     Matt> you don't have a whole lot of things that you might want in
 >     Matt> a formal, published document.

 > No, you have them in SGML---you just have to write replacement code
to

Not in SGML. I was talking about presentation features such as
columns of running text, which SGML by design doesn't deal with.

 > get them, and you have to rewrite that code and possibly the API
 > between that code and the DTD if you want to change it.  DSSSL will
 > make it possible to do that portably (across different backends as
 > well as different system platforms).

Yes, the DSSSL standard makes a lot of things possible ... including
top-to-bottom and bidirectional text, that kind of good
internationalization support. But it's a very young standard, and Jade 
is a very young project, not yet the sort of thing you could use
to produce complexly-formatted documents on a day-to-day basis.

 > Or instead you (somebody out there, anyway) could write the
 > generalized code and contribute it to jade ;-)

Hm, yes, I plan to contribute in some small way. But it'll 
be awhile before Jade is "ready for prime time." I've seen questions
come up on the DSSSL mailing list about the (not-yet-implemented) full 
page model, and I've seen James Clark respond to some of these without
saying anything to the effect that he or anyone is working on it,
which leads me to believe it's not going to happen very soon. Probably 
not because people don't want it, but because it's a massive undertaking.

 > But AFAIK what comes out the other end is normalized SGML.  Not a
 > bitmap of the printed page, HPGL, Postscript, TeX, or LaTeX, but a
 > highly retargetable markup stream.

Actually, yes ... technically it's called a Flow Object Tree. But when 
you invoke Jade you can give it an option specifying the output
format, which causes Jade to send its output to the appropriate back
end processor, so that you go from SGML to TeX, HTML, RTF, etc. with a 
single command.

 >     >> Another application would be to have a browser display
 >     >> stylesheet for HTML, and a print style sheet for the same
 >     >> html.dtd.
 > 
 >     Matt> Note the "would be." This usefulness of this excellent idea
 >     Matt> depends, of course, on the browser-makers supporting it. And
 >     Matt> given their half-hearted support for the very simple CSS
 >     Matt> standard, DSSSL support may be too much to hope for in our
 >     Matt> lifetimes.
 > 
 > If you (or somebody out there with the skills and the time to
 > contribute) want it, do it yourself; Mozilla is free now, and so is
 > w3.el.  Or Arena, which has the best style sheet support of all
 > (reputedly).

Yeah, good point. But contributing to Mozilla is one thing; getting
Netscape to adopt the improvements for the commercial version, or
getting ordinary people to use a free Mozilla (not to mention
switching from MSIE to Netscape) is another. I'm not, in general, one
to sit around griping about what we ain't got, but the existence or
non-existence of standards-compliant software is only a small part of
the problem.

The point of having web stylesheets is to let authors format their
pages using appropriate methods (i.e., by formatting them, rather than
with low-level HTML hacking), while preserving/expanding universal
access to the content. And as a fringe benefit, CSS *should* vastly
simplify the task of making attractive websites. Instead we just seem
to have another layer of complexity ... because, as I've been finding
out in the past few weeks, current support for stylesheets is so
haphazard that the best you can really do is sort of a hybrid of CSS
and the old nasty HTML tricks (such as, you can dispense with the
single-pixel GIF trick, but you still need tables for any kind of
interesting page layout). Judging from the way Netscape and MS do CSS
at present, they don't seem to really grasp the concept at all. (well, 
actually, dunno about MSIE 4; I know that CSS is horribly broken in
MSIE 3).

So it seems to me that a large part of the task is advocacy -- telling 
everybody who might understand and care why stylesheets are good,
putting pressure on Netscape and MS to do the right thing,
etc. Myself, I'm working on a website that's supposed to help educate
people about free document-making technologies like SGML ... kind of a 
blind-leading-the-blind thing, but what the hey ... and I certainly
intend to preach the stylesheet gospel. But at the same time I can't
help thinking it might be a losing battle. If anyone's got a better
idea, I'm listening.

Matt Gushee
Oshamanbe, Hokkaido


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