From: Alan G Isaac (aisaac@american.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 28 2002 - 11:28:52 EST
> On Thu, 26 Dec 2002, Alan G Isaac wrote:
>> iii. Why is CSS import helpful? Because HTML
>> is a useful document exchange format only with
>> CSS support, and I use HTML in preference to RTF
>> (for many reasons).
On Fri, 27 Dec 2002 18:37:33 +0000 (GMT) F J Franklin <F.J.Franklin@sheffield.ac.uk> wrote:
> You haven't really answered my question, though. I completely agree that
> CSS support is useful and desired, but what I want to know is why you need
> CSS *import* specifically... do you just want style="..." attributes to be
> understood? or do you want style sheets imported as document styles
> (interesting idea)? or do you want embedded/external CSS style sheets to
> be parsed and applied to the document (not desired, IMHO)?
The last.
Why is this not desirable?
If style sheets can be imported as document styles,
how would this be different from the last case
(although as an option)?
As for why this is desirable, let me offer a point of
comparison. If you use Acrobat, perhaps you have imported
web pages with it. What is the single largest annoyance
when one does this? In my opinion it is the failure to
honor embedded/external CSS style sheets. Bottom line:
Acrobat's HTML import is almost useless whenever style
sheets play a serious role. This has at times forced me to
import documents into MS Word (which gives reasonable
support for CSS) and then export them to PDF.
Does XHTML Basic have a serious role to play? I think so.
If you honor only the style attribute and not external
style sheets, then it will be impossible to honor the
formatting intents of anyone producing documents with
that DTD. It seems to me that there is a fundamental issue
of "playing nicely with others" here. If you think that
XHTML and CSS are well enough thought out that they will
be playing an important role in document exchange, then
you might want AbiWord to be able to participate.
As a non-programmer, I see my primary way of making a
contribution to be finding bugs and pointing to what I
believe are shortcomings. But I always hate focusing on a
deficiency of a wonderful effort. Thanks for a great
application.
Cheers,
Alan Isaac
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