Re: [xml-dev] CSS selectors are syntactic sugar for XPath expressions

[Tony Graham <tgraham@antenna.co.jp>]

On 22/03/2022 01:13, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
...
> Which came first depends on whether you see XPath as a natural
> evolution of HyTime and TEI Pointers combined with the needs of DSSSL,
> or as something new, but then, CSS was influenced by Grif.
Maybe not so much: Hakon Wium Lie's Ph.D thesis on Cascading Style
Sheets [1], unsurprisingly, cites [2] his own 'Cascading HTML Style
Sheets' (CHSS) [3] and Bert Bos's 'Stream-based style sheet proposal'
(SSP) as the basis for CSS development.

CHSS selectors look like the left-side of X11 Resource declarations.
SSP selectors also look a lot like X11 Resource names that use '*' to
skip levels of the element hierarchy.

The thesis discusses the P language [5] that is one of the 'Thot'
languages implemented in the Thot library that is/was part of both Grif
and the Amaya web browser, among others.  As described in the thesis,
the P language in Amaya had to be extended to better handle CSS.

The more complex P selector provided in the thesis manages to not look
like CSS:

LI: BEGIN
  if within OL Size: 10 pt;
END;

Regards,


Tony Graham.
--
Senior Architect
XML Division
Antenna House, Inc.
----
Skerries, Ireland
tgraham@antenna.co.jp


[1] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20220214071421/https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/
[2] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20220214071421/https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/#h-274
[3] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20220214071421/https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/#h-164
[4] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20220214071421/https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/#h-231
[5] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20220214071421/https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/#h-107