[sclug] CSS

[David Given]

On Wednesday 19 October 2005 16:24, Tom Dawes-Gamble wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 02:16 +0100, David Given wrote:
> > In fact, CSS in general sucks. It's woefully inadequate as a layout
> > language.
>
> So what do you recommend as a better alternative.

Well, there's obviously TeX and LaTeX, which can generate superb results --- 
but they're not a lot of use for web pages, and they're a bit elderly and 
require constant fiddling in order to get them to work right ("overfull hbox" 
--- shudder). Good 'ol troff is much maligned, too. Once you've figured out 
how it works, it can solve most everyday typesetting problems with a minimal 
of effort, and is a fraction of the size of TeX.

XSL Formatting Objects are interesting; XSL-FO a page description language 
based on XML, that can be used to generate PDF, Postscript and the like. I 
wouldn't write in it by hand, but it appears to be quite well suited as an 
intermediate format --- the general idea is that you could write in an 
application-specific XML dialect, and then have an XSL transformers that 
converts that into XSL-FO, and then you can run it through fop and turn it 
into PDF.

Unfortunately, CSS is the only game in town if you want web pages. (I 
periodically wonder about how feasible it would be to do your layout using 
Javascript to modify the HTML code, which ought to let you do things that CSS 
can't do, but nothing ever comes of it.)

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ 
|  dg at cowlark.com    | "All power corrupts, but we need electricity." ---
| (dg at tao-group.com) | Diana Wynne Jones, _Archer's Goon_
+- www.cowlark.com --+ 

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