[osis-core] styles

[Todd Tillinghast]

Harry,

How is it that you have formatting information that you need to store?

I am not familiar with the workings of Word 2003, but I would expect
that users would be restricted to creating/editing elements and
attributes per the schema and that an XSLT transformation would
determine how the XML elements and attributes would be
formatted/presented as the user types.  (All traditional Word
unstructured text formatting would be turned off/disabled.)

If a user wants to express something that they would be tempted to
express using formatting they should use the appropriate OSIS elements
and/or attributes.  In some cases they may need to use an "x-" type to
properly record something AND would need to express the corresponding
formatting styles in the syntax of the rendering technology they are
currently using.

I would expect that if you want to allow the user to specify formatting
in addition to the "standard" formatting directed by the XSLT
transformation being used that you would allow the user to create new
<xsl:template> elements in the XSLT transformation that have more
specific XPath match expressions to achieve the desired presentation.  I
don't suspect that CSS would allow such elaborate XPath expressions.

STORING CSS WITHIN AN OSIS DOCUMENT:
1) I think that storing CSS information within an OSIS document is
dangerous because I believe it will encourage users to put ideological
information into the CSS stored in the OSIS document and not into the
XML elements themselves, leaving the resulting XML portion incomplete
without the CSS based interpretation and presentation.
2) I think we should NOT put CSS in OSIS documents because it implies a
secondary standard and technology.  OSIS documents should be timeless
and independent of presentation and secondary standards related to
rendering.

Todd

> -----Original Message-----
> From: osis-core-admin@bibletechnologieswg.org [mailto:osis-core-
> admin@bibletechnologieswg.org] On Behalf Of Harry Plantinga
> Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 12:48 PM
> To: Osis-core mailing list
> Cc: Andrew Proper
> Subject: [osis-core] styles
> 
> Andrew Proper and I are still having trouble getting our Microsoft
Word
> 2003 osis-import XSLT to read in two different files, because of the
way
> Word/XSLT handles temporary directories.
> 
> We are currently considering the following solution for storing a
> document stylesheet inside the OSIS file itself. Tell us if it's too
> horrible to contemplate:
> 
> Add an element in the header of the document, something like this:
> 
> <html:style type="text/css">
>   p   {text-indent: 0.5in; margin-top: 12pt}
> </html:style>
> 
> Of course, it will be possible to store the OSIS document and the
> stylesheet separately and combine them into one or split a combined
file
> into two with simple utilities. This is just for getting the document
> and styling into and out of Word.
> 
> ------------------------
> 
> The other issue is that CSS, not being XML syntax, is easy to generate
> but hard to parse for other purposes. It will be hard to read in a CSS
> stylesheet and parse it with an XSLT. So CSS may in fact not be
> appropriate.
> 
> It turns out that XSL-FO doesn't really seem appropriate to us either.
> It is intended for describing formatted blocks and pages, not standoff
> formatting per se.
> 
> We could make up our own XML syntax for the CSS stylesheet, as the
CCEL
> already does. (See the stylesheets in /ccel/c/calvin/calcom01.xml, for
> example -- one CSS, one an XML representation of CSS.) Or, we could
just
> duplicate the WordML stylesheet.  Any other suggestions for an
> XML-format stylesheet language we could use?
> 
> Or shall we embed all the formatting in <hi> elements? [WARNING: THAT
> WAS ONLY AN ATTEMPT AT HUMOR]
> 
> -Harry Plantinga
> 
> 
> 
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