Re: [xml-dev] XML and CSS

[Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsberger@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:49 AM, David A. Lee <dlee@calldei.com> wrote:
> I read this with interest, and IMHO the biggest thing "missing" is what I
> think is the fundamental issue of CSS for XML.
> That is you cant re-order the elements !   (Please tell me I'm wrong  .. but
> thats my understanding).
>

I have to ask, why do you want to reorder the elements?  That's partly
what XSLT is for, but browser support can be unpredictable.  However,
I think what you really want to do is change the position they are
given on the screen (/page)?  If so, yes CSS can place any element in
any (mostly arbitrary) position.  However, that requires absolute
positioning which can be a real pain, in particular for things like
resizable pages.  The latter problem can somewhat be addressed by
using "em" (characters) as your positioning units instead of the more
ubiquitous "px" (pixels), but getting predictable cross browser
results is tedious at best and often impossible for anything
non-trivial...

-- 
Peter Hunsberger