You can call it a triumph of mediocrity, or regression to the mean, or
the good being the enemy of the better. You can even blame the dastardly
twin tempters "low-cost" and "ease-of-use".
But the fact remains: the world of computer-mediated literate exchange
is crippled and poorer because we abandoned the flow object as a
central, standardized abstraction in the process. DSSSL of course was
too egg-headed for general adoption. XSL(FO)2 might have been a workable
approximation.
No matter how many refinements and modules you pile on to CSS, it's
still all about setting font and paragraph characteristics on strings of
text. That's just TeX in a new way. (Not knocking CSS or TeX here,
they're both great in their fields of application.) The rise of CSS
super-syntaxes such as "less" and "sass" points to the inherent
limitations. These applications are to CSS as LaTeX is to TeX, and they
further delude users into thinking this is a programming problem rather
than a semantic one.
The genius (actually, one of many) of DSSSL, mostly preserved in
XSL(FO), was the flow object: an entity that could carry not only
formatting directives and characteristics, but semantic traits as well.
This might not have been such an obvious benefit in 1997, but after 2
decades of RDF and semantic web explorations it is much more relevant.
Those who care greatly about the relationships between ideas, texts, and
representations need a formalism such as flow objects in their computer
applications. But such people, as Liam can attest, are a dwindling--and
I would guess, aging--population.
Regards,
--Paul
On Thu, 2018-01-18 at 16:41 +0000, Michael Kay mike(_at_)saxonica(_dot_)com
wrote:
However, CSS is so much easier to work with and is so much more
accepted that the cost in functionality and spec fuzziness is far
outweighed by the ability to use less-specialized personnel to do
the styling work.
Same sad story really. Mediocrity always wins in the end.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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