Re: [xml-dev] Where is XML going

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 12/5/10 11:30 AM, Kurt Cagle wrote:
> David,
>
> CSS by itself is insufficient for presentation for all but the most well
> structured of documents. HTML works well with CSS because HTML has a
> structural ordering that works well with the CSS model (as to be
> expected, given that CSS evolved in response to HTML).  Some years ago I
> wrote a couple of chapters for a book on XML and CSS, showing how you
> can apply CSS to XML, but as I proved back even then, very, very few XML
> schemas are in fact even remotely appropriate for direct presentation
> with CSS.

This flunks the 80/20 rule badly.  20% of use cases are hard enough to 
require transformations.  I'd go so far as to say that only 20% of that 
20% requires transformation in the browser.

They're totally interesting problems, but unusual enough that the simple 
answer for working with CSS and markup is to create markup you can work 
with in the browser.  There are only about 1.5 million approaches to 
doing that.

The Web has ignored our glorious creations because it mostly doesn't 
need them.  The one exception I can think of is XLink/XPointer, which I 
suspect failed because it never seemed simple enough to actually use - 
the simple links that hit the 80 mark are already supported more simply 
elsewhere.

Thanks,
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/