[osis-core] styles

[Harry Plantinga]

Todd Tillinghast wrote:

>Harry,
>
>How is it that you have formatting information that you need to store?
>  
>
Todd,

A document stylesheet would allow you to say how all elements of a 
certain type should be rendered. Whether or not you allow exceptions to 
rules, you need to have the rules in the first place.

>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.
>  
>
I suppose you could store formatting in an XSLT stylesheet, but that's 
kind of like writing
a program that prints out your term paper. I prefer a declarative 
representation of a stylesheet
when possible.

>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.
>  
>
Granted, storing a CSS element in an OSIS document is undesirable. But 
since we have the ability to output only one files, it's either that or 
no document stylesheet for formatting. Of course, we can immediately 
separate out the stylesheet into a separate file if desired...

-Harry