Exactly - for now. I actually had CSS in mind when I gave my earlier proposal - it was kind of a backwards CSS "class" model. I don't see any need to shoehorn actual CSS into this, but instead we should leverage the tools we have to get the most gain with as little work as possible. I'm not sure CSS will ever be completely appropriate for chandler, but even if we can match some of the selector model, people will be able to adapt their understanding of rule matches and so forth.Sounds like at this point this is water under the bridge, though :)
For now, at least.
I've thought about this a bit further and I think we can accomplish something very similar to id/class matching like CSS by making use of some of chandler's Query infrastructure, and some of the bidirectional stuff, simplier than my earlier proposal.
Specifically:
<Style>
<!-- almost identical to CSS's #id selector, applying to a specific block -->
<applyToBlock itemref="somedoc:SomeSpecificBlock">
<StyleRule.../>
</Style>
and
<Style>
<!-- almost identical to CSS's .class selector, applying to a set of blocks -->
<applyToBlocks rule="for i in ... where someattribute='somevalue'"/>
<StyleRule.../>
</Style>
If down the line someone wanted to adapt this stuff to read rules from CSS and store them in the repository in the same way they would if they came in from parcel.xml, more power to them! The serialization format doesn't matter as long as we're consistent about how we store it in the repository.
Alec
But, per Alec, I would like to see the visual appearance of Chandler in
its current state cleaned up as long as it doesn't introduce material
delays.
I don't think switching to a different style description language would provide any visual cleaning in the short term. Using CSS instead of a custom style language is more of a platform/interop issue. If you tell a web designer (or a designer familiar with Mozilla) they should do styling using CSS, it should be easy for them to theme Chandler or their favorite parcel.
Designers certainly can learn a new language, I think the pool of people who'll do this is smaller than the pool who would hack at something that used CSS.
On the other hand, I really don't think Chandler wants to reimplement XUL, or make CPIA look like DOM. Many facets of CSS just won't apply to Chandler, ever. It's entirely possible a partial implementation of CSS might be more frustrating to web developers than learning a new style language!
It's not clear to me how much trying to do a limited amount of styling using CSS would delay, say, 0.6. I suspect it would slow things down a fair bit. However, this might be one of those things that will slow us down more the longer we wait to implement it.
Sincerely, Jeffrey _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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