Hi Bill,
I have been toiling away at the parser and viewer and have a font colour
implementation about 75% done (which I can send to you if you would like to
give it a go-over).
However, I was wondering about a possible XML-type implementation also,
specifically for the formatting aspect of the displayed elements. It would
be much nicer for more of the content providers if there was just a style
sheet to control fore/backcolors, paragraph spacing, font-weight, hr
element, spaces between list elements, etc. For two reasons:
1) So the created content is just nice pure tags of content, instead of
being riddled with <font color=..."> and so on (and also so don't have to go
all the way through an existing XML document, and put all these extra things
in).
2) Some html elements have no official HTML spec to otherwise access their
properties at design time (such as spacing above and below a horizontal
line, or the color of a horizontal line).
A stylesheet would also be handy on the end user end of downloaded content
too, since could specify how they want their pages displayed (ie I always
want my links in blue, or with a yellow backcolor, I want my list elements
flush with the left edge of the screen, etc) when crawled from web, without
having to hack the parser--just modify the stylesheet.
For the longterm of handheld site providers, I think there will be an
eventual switch away from the current situation of all the <font="...">
stfff to css: both because it is less time just to send down the formatting
info once, and have smaller pages, and it is easier to maintain multiple
versions of the content customized for display on widely variable displays.
Best wishes,
Robert
