XSL Debate, Leventhal responds to Stephen Deach

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 08:58 AM 6/16/99 -0700, David Brownell wrote:
>Yes, it's true that CSS alone doesn't let you handle what
>the HTML "<img src='...'/>" and "<a href='...'>...</a>" elements
>do ... or "<table>" (till CSS2 happens) and others.  But even
>for content that doesn't require those sorts of presentation,
>you can see the "dumbing down" effect when you transform the
>content from "semantic markup" to "XML that CSS can render".

To some extent, you're right, and I've acknowledged that CSS could use some
_simple_ transformative mechanisms (plus support from XLink) to accomplish
some of these tasks, or you could just use the DOM+Scripting, which I think
is a reasonable approach to these kinds of problems.

However, I think a fundamental point that both you and Paul are missing
here is that even _if_ you have to reorganize your document so that CSS can
display it easily, the impact of that 'dumbing down' is much less dramatic
than the impact of transformation to formatting objects or XSL.  It's a
smaller project that creates less dramatic problems. 

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical (July)
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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