Re: Stylesheets considered limiting (was Re: XLink - where are we?)

Paul Prescod (papresco@technologist.com)
Thu, 12 Nov 1998 08:07:33 -0600

Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>
> Nope. In Java the task for me is:
> - to identify how to map Java classes onto elements. I haven't followed
> XSL but I assume it gives little or no help.
> - how to create different on-line displays interactively. I'd like to
> insert buttons where there are hyperlinks, for example. Is all that in XSL.
>
>...
>
> I am making the assumptions that a large number of XML documents will
> never have stylesheets. Very few do at the moment. So JUMBO was designed
> with the idea that we will have to cope with documents **that do not have
> stylesheets**.

If you find a way to map elements to Java classes so that Java classes
provide behaviour for elements, then you will have *made a stylesheet* and
you will have used Java as your stylesheet language.

> The current mainstream view - as exemplified by Hybrick -
> seems to be that such a document is broken. I don't accept this :-)

I'm not sure that I would call HyBrick "mainstream". It is cool, but it
doesn't represent the Microsoft/Netscape establishment's view of how the
world should work.

Anyhow, HyBrick's view is that if HyBrick cannot be taught to process the
document (through DSSSL, HyBrick's stylesheet/extension language) then the
document is useless for use in HyBrick. Likely the same holds true for
Jumbo. All you can do without some kind of functional specification
("stylesheet) is display an undifferentiated tree view (or, with RDF, a
more arbitrary graph view).

If that's all you want to do, you don't need stylesheets. HyBrick clearly
isn't intended to be a tree viewer, however.

> Does this imply that it's not XML-compatible at present? Because I suspect
> people will get increasingly frustrated with SGML-over-the-wire (e.g.
> Hybrick at present) because they don't know how to manage declarations and
> catalogs.

Although I don't know anything about ISMID, I presume from the sentence
below that ISMID doesn't exist yet:

> >There is the ISMID (Interchange Standard for Modifiable Interactive
> >Documents) that is being developed in SC34 of ISO/IEC JTC1. It's goal is to

The current *draft* is not XML friendly, I guess. Most likely there will
be no tools for people to get frustrated with until there is a standard
and that standard will most likely be XML friendly.

Paul Prescod - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

At today's pop doubling rates, in 100 years there will be 20 billion
people, more than enough to fill the earth. In 300 years, we will have
filled up 16 earth-sized planets (roughly, our solar system). In 2300
years we will have filled up 200 billion earth-sized planets (roughly,
our galaxy). Only one technology can save us: birth control.