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michael.h.kay@ntlworld.com (Michael Kay) writes:
>> However, the XSLT based approach is more complicated. I could
>> create a template for para, but then that would override
>> *all* of the default styling for paragraphs, which is not
>> what I want. The lack of additive, cascading templates in
>> XSLT means that I would need a detailed knowledge of the
>> structure of the default style sheets in order to customise
>> them effectively, whereas CSS allows me to concentrate on the
>> structure of my documents instead.
>
>Customisable XSLT stylesheets can certainly be written, though it's
>true that they do require careful design and documentation. It's very
>similar to writing customisable DTDs, in fact, and has the same
>characteristic that the person doing the customising has to become
>pretty familiar with the design of the base styesheet.
>
>So: it's not easy, but it can be done, and is well worth doing.
It certainly _can_ be done. The problem I see is that the user of an
XSLT stylesheet is far more severely at the mercy of the stylesheet
writer than is the case with CSS, as users have to worry far less about
how the CSS was originally written in order to override.
CSS seems to me to have been written with such cases in mind, and its
design suggests to me that its creators expected that developers would
want to create stylesheets for specific instance documents as well as
stylesheets for classes of documents. XSLT excels at the latter
problem, but creates an enormous amount of work if document-by-document
tweaking is valuable to you.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org
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