Re: Generate CSS to display FO on a web browser

["Sebastian Rahtz" <sebastian dot rahtz at computing-services dot oxford dot ac dot uk>]

David Allouche writes:

 > Do you know of any tool that can generate a CSS stylesheet usable to
 > display a given XML instance containing Formatting Objects in a XML-aware
 > browser.

seems odd. I am not convinced by the arguments against just
transforming to HTML+CSS, if you find CSS powerful enough.

 > - CSS plus XSLT leave many holes that are not easily fixed in a way that
 > can be both human readable and easily automatable.  I think of conditional
 > styling based on XPath-like logic, something that is done with the
 > expression syntax of Dynatext.

can you give an example of something you cant do here?

 > those problems, and make the conversion much simpler.  But there is still
 > no such thing as a FO-aware browser with hypertext (just <html:a> is
 > enough) capability.

Acrobat (plugged into your browser) has perfectly good
hypertext functionality. so transform your FO to PDF...

 > Since CSS is so much like FO, there must be a way to generate a CSS
 > stylesheet to display (simple) FOs... 

I agree. It sounds a doable project. It just seems slightly
sterile. If you write an HTML with nothing but <div> and <span>
elements, and the appropriate CSS file, you are there, arent you?

Sebastian


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