> Sometimes there seems to be an interesting dichotomy growing with regard to
> presentation. There exists a noble wish to restrict HTML to primarily a
> logical markup language. Those who wish control over presentation are often
> pointed towards an external format such as PDF, or reduced to having to use
> bitmapped images. Yet, it seems that such a solution is the worst possible
> solution since we lose all logical markup (and most presentation control for
> the user). It seems that an early appearance of style sheets (and HTML 3.0)
> is our only hope.
Low level page layout (GIF, JPEG, PDF, ...) is a tempting short term
solution for control over presentation, but is much too limiting for
the longer term.
o How do you maintain control over presentation when
the end machine has limited resources, e.g. fonts,
resolution, colors and window size?
o How do you support dynamic layout effectively?
Rule-based style sheets allow information providers rich
control over appearance for a wide range of window sizes.
o How do you accomodate to user preferences, particularly
for changes needed by people with visual impairments?
The World Wide Web Organization is working to develop rich style
sheet mechanisms that tackles each of these issues and can also be
used for arbitrary SGML document formats, not just HTML.
-- Best wishes,Dave Raggett ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hewlett Packard Laboratories email: dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com Filton Road, Stoke Gifford tel: +44 272 228046 Bristol BS12 6QZ fax: +44 272 228003 United Kingdom