RE: DSSSL & Interleaf

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Tue, 16 Jan 1996 02:46:55 -0500

>>This is, of course, in addition to the fact that to accomplish it's
>>main goal of avoiding tag explosion, it will have to be able to supply
>>all of the possibilities that tag explosion allows. It is not even
>>close yet, and probably will never approach this goal.
>
>I still feel that CSS helps avert a large amount of tag explosion; for
>example, if we had had CSS in place in Internet Explorer 2.0, there would
>have been no "need" to create a tag for marquees.

No, there would instead be the need to support marquees in CSS. That
mentality leads to hack upon hack going into CSS, leading to exactly
the same problem that HTML currently faces: only in the stylesheet
language (and I believe Jeff Yemin pointed this out at WWW4). I think
many people have also pointed out that for stylesheets languages to be
of and great value, they must also include some scripting capability.

>Exactly, and in support for those who really care about stylesheets, I
>personally encourage the development of DSSSL-O, DSSSL itself, and any other
>future stylesheet proposals. The "average WWW surfer" is, however, exactly
>the person we as a company need to support. I do not believe this is to the
>exclusion of those who "really *care* about stylesheets," however.

I very much doubt that the average surfer would care about stylesheets
at all. The people who care about stylesheets are *publishers*, and it
has been demonstrated more times than one that CSS is unadequate for
their needs.

One other thing: tag explosion per se is not a bad thing, when it is
coupled together with stylesheets. This allows users to write their
documents using the logical structure they choose, and to define the
way the data should be presented.

Many people, far more intelligent than I, have already travelled
down this path, more than once, over the last 20 years. I think it
might be best if we learned from them.