On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 04:21:28PM +0200, Hussein Shafie wrote:
> But my question is now: do we need to go so far in emulating the XSLT
> style sheets?
>
> For me, the fact that a document looks very different on screen and in
> print is really not a problem.
>
> In my opinion, the CSS should be only used to make the text easy to read
> and the structure easy to understand.
I quite agree. A main attraction of XML, to me, is its ability
to flexible describe content in a way orthogonal to presentation.
However, the reality is that any content must have *some* presentation,
and subtle issues arise when dealing with this.
Should authors be able to get a paper representation of what they see on
screen for editing and additional markup? This is, perhaps, the primary
question I've faced, and as a compromise I've answered "yes". At my
authors' request, I have massaged the CSS to allow for an (alternate)
"print" stylesheet which tries to faithfully maintain the structure of
the document while removing any artifacts of the close coupling between
the on-screen appearance of an XML doc and the XXE interface.
For example (related to the origin of this thread), the default
presentation for DocBook xrefs is fine when working in XXE (you can
neatly use DocBook > Go to Opposite Link End to find the end of the
reference), but when printed there is no visual indication of where a
linkend "ends". The id information (and in general, much attribute
information) is lost when the view of the doc is divorced from the
interface. Which leads us to this CSS snippet, which helps to reinforce
the meaning of the reference.
This compromise may have adverse affects on the authoring experience,
but it's hard for me to judge at this stage.
Admittedly, there are other questions and issues which have influenced
this decision. First, developing a good FO stylesheet (or even
customization) is harder than CSS (in my opinion). Further, using FO
requires a FO processor; I want to use FOP, but it currently has too
many limitations. I actually plan to use FO when we get to publication
stage, but for the time being we are printing documents for in-house
review, and so authors want documents which "feel" like the versions
they have been editing. I've found that authors are quite wary of the
differences in formats that translation creates.
There's a lot of inertia for File > Print, and it's hard to avoid in my
recent experience. <humor>Now, if only we could fix all of XXE's little
print glitches, we might have a perfect authoring experience. Or,
perhaps there could be a customization option to replace File > Print
with an FO transform, thereby forcing authors into the 21st
century!</humor>
Take care,
John L. Clark
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