On Saturday 26 June 1999, at 20 h 33, the keyboard of Adam Di Carlo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Practically, most of the problems with actually dealing with Jade boil > down to learning curve (a lot of people are learning SGML or XML at > the same time), or problems with the backends. Jade backends are not > always what they might be. It is certainly the main problem with full-SGML. Unlike HTML, where the Ordinary User can actually read a few "HTML for pithecanthropes" pages in the morning and have its Web server working in the afternoon, full-SGML needs twenty years of careful study to be effective. The lack of good tutorials, the lack of readable reference materials, add to the problem. No wonder XML had such a marketing success (the technical success is yet to come). Not only it is free (see Bart Schuller's message) but you can write a parser in an hour, you can read and understand the spec, etc. > CSS is just an annotation model -- you just attach style to rectangles > of text. You can't use it to do things you might do in DSSSL or XSL. > For instance, you couldn't create a TOC in the stylesheet with CSS. Yes but CSS, like HTML and unlike DSSSL, can be learned in less than a day. Whatever its proponents say, XSL in its full power does not seem much easier than DSSSL. > > The only widely accepted XML formatting standard is to use XSLT to > > generate HTML. Both print and native browser rendering is currently in > > turmoil. > > Actually, you can use jade/DSSSL to render XML or SGML. For XML, the Perl/Python/Java hacker will probably find much easier to write a custom parser (which is, in effect, a stylesheet hardcoded into the parser) than to learn DSSSL. With tools like XML::Parser for Perl or XP for Java, it is a piece of cake. It is probably not realistic for a huge DTD like DocBk, but for most DTDs, it is a very convenient way.
