On Thu, 2018-01-18 at 18:15 +0000, Eliot Kimber ekimber(_at_)contrext(_dot_)com
wrote:
I would disagree with your assessment that CSS pagination is not
easier than FO *if* there was appropriate how-to guidance available.
We did a poor job (collectively) at tutorials and outreach for XML
technology, both at W3C and in the wider community, and we now pay a
price for that.
It would also help to have a less-like facility that could be easily
used with XSLT
It's not too hard to implement (non-cascading) CSS custom properties
("variables") in XSLT, with a simple XML document to give the values.
Granted, working out the details of how to translate your source into
appropriate pages is inherently challenging.
Yes - the syntax is (by and large) the easy part, although as with any
batch formatting system, getting page numbers and headers under control
can be a challenge.
But I think CSS's way of capturing the design details as
implementation artifacts is much more accessible to designers than
XSL-FO page masters and page sequence masters. With some appropriate
templating of page rules it could be pretty easy to define and
maintain.
Yes, especially with flex and grid now in all major browsers.
Another practical issue, and one that should not be underestimated,
is the need to synthesize elements in source content to enable
generation of running headers and footers (more generally, any edge
region content).
Because of the way CSS works you can't have an element that both
contributes its structured content to an edge region and is shown in
the main flow.
This isn't entirely true, as you can use content: element(#foo) to
reuse an element, but yes, only as a string value.
The XSLT+CSS approach separates the details of what *content* goes in
the running heads and the styling details (where it appears on the
page and how it's formatted in that context).
Note also that for CSS pagination to work well the input really needs
to be HTML, not arbitrary XML. While CSS can, in theory, be applied
to arbitrary XML, in practice it doesn't really work, for a number of
reasons, not least of which is CSS's lack of support for namespace-
aware selection.
CSS has namespace-aware selectors and has had for many years. It's in
CSS 2.1 iirc.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@namespace
You have to use | rather than colon, as CSS usd : for something else,
so you end up with
@namespace h url(http://example.org/ns/hosiery)
and then using
h|sock { color: black; }
Leigh White's DITA for Print book serves as an excellent example of a
comprehensive how-to guide to doing complex pagination with non-
obvious technology from sophisticated XML source.
Yay, and it's $165.93 on Amazon. I'll take ten... :) i found a PDF
extract, looks like it might be very interesting
If we had a comparable book for CSS pagination I think most people
tasked with applying CSS for pagination would be able to be
productive with a minimum of pain.
The challenge of course is finding someone to write such a book (and
keep it up to date as the technology evolves)....
Maybe if i retire and am independently wealthy :)
In the meantime see e.g. Rachel Andrew's book on flex and grid to get a
feel for where things might be going -
http://amzn.to/2rjY7oL [referrer link, make me rich!]
Liam
--
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG
Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
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