At 09:34 AM 7/8/2003 -0400, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> This whole discussion seems completely irrelevant to me.  Say you were to
> author (by hand) a document to be displayed.  It is either an html document,
> or an xml one that is destined to be converted into an html document by an
> xslt transformation.  YOU get to decide how to style the document.  You can
> lay out the page using tables for formatting, or you can use CSS.  You can
> specify fonts inside elements using CSS or <font> elements, or in a separate
> CSS stylesheet.  And so on and so on.

However irrelevant it may seem, I don't think this conversation is ever 
going to end - not for technical reasons, but for political 
ones.  Technically, I think there are pros and cons for using 
transformations for style, and those have been gone over repeatedly already.

Politically, this conversation was set up long ago when XSL was presented 
as a competitor to CSS.  At this point a lot of XSL supporters shake their 
heads and say that "XSL is really designed to tackle the complex problems 
of paginated output", but that's not always been the story, nor does that 
reflect how a lot of this has played out.

Reading the original XSL submission (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XSL-970910), 
we find this cheerful paragraph:

"XSL is a stylesheet language designed for the Web community. It provides 
functionality beyond CSS (e.g. element reordering). We expect that CSS will 
be used to display simply-structured XML documents and XSL will be used 
where more powerful formatting capabilities are required or for formatting 
highly structured information such as XML structured data or XML documents 
that contain structrued data. "

Unfortunately, that set the stage for some really unpleasant battles.  From 
my perspective as a Web developer, a bunch of arrogant SGML people (and 
Microsoft!) were walking up to the place that had given us CSS, pronounced 
it inadequate for real work, and said it was time to start 
over.  Integration with CSS came a lot later, after bad blood had been 
around for a long time.

I don't see much reason for this conversation to wane, despite my own 
working on both sides of it over the years.  We wound up with two 
vaguely-related specifications that are sort of compatible but operate in 
very different ways, with very different communities.  That's a natural 
recipe for conflict.

It's also an excellent trope for what a lousy job the XML community did at 
reaching Web developers, and had the practical effect of giving Microsoft 
an excellent story for never getting around to implementing the CSS2 
properties that make formatting XML directly with CSS much easier.  "I want 
to present my XML data as a table." "You want that?  Use XSLT!"  "But I 
know CSS!"  "Too bad."

Technically, both sides have some cool stuff.  Politically, this has been a 
disaster from the outset.



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