On Nov 6, 2006, at 15:44, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 03:32:55 +0600, Henri Sivonen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
It's not only about printing-while-downloading. It's about the
ability to print an arbitrarily long document without consuming
infinite memory for DOM.
What kind of use is this about? Is this about XHTML-Print-type
stuff or about Prince-type high-end formatting? CSS already allows
page number references, which means that the formatter has to
paginate the whole document in order to make forward reference by
page number.
I have never seen the source of a print-only CSS formatter, but I
imagine an optimized implementation could optimize away the DOM
but would still have to keep the entire CSS frame tree in memory
(at least when there's generated content that depends on later
page numbers).
TeX uses repeated passes over a long document to handle cross-
references properly using limited memory. It would be useful if
HTML allowed something like that.
I see streaming bounded-memory operation and multiple passes as two
totally different things. Making multiple passes on something stored
on disk isn't streaming operation. It is more like an application-
specific virtual memory. Even if it was bounded in terms of RAM, it
isn't bounded in terms of disk.
Do you have specific real apps in mind?
--
Henri Sivonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
