Quote:
Originally Posted by nick_
No. The discussion is (XHTML+CSS) versus PDF or LATEX. These are the formats.
I said nothing about the rendering engines.
|
Wouldn't it be fair to say that without a rendering engine, the markup is relatively useless?
For me, the winner of a standards war must involve
a) an open standard (fully documented and all features publicly available - pdf is a fail for me in the context of publicly released user-editable forms/documents, though I love it as a print-only medium for design, documents requiring specific layouts etc)
b) a way to display that information following consistent and documented standards (i.e., all our current web-browsers display things differently meaning xhtml/css is a fail in this regard, though they generally get 'close enough' in most circumstances. If a border or the padding on a table is supposed to be 3 pixels, it should be 3 pixels.
XHTML allows for different rendering choices (CSS markup) based on device (media), when identified. Perhaps a standard that goes beyond the following choices is needed:
all Used for all media type devices
aural Used for speech and sound synthesizers
braille Used for braille tactile feedback devices
embossed Used for paged braille printers
handheld Used for small or handheld devices
print Used for printers
projection Used for projected presentations, like slides
screen Used for computer screens
tty Used for media using a fixed-pitch character grid, like teletypes and terminals
tv Used for television-type devices
Something that includes, for example information about resolution and screen size as opposed to the generic "handheld" or "screen". This would allow for modified output depending on device used that goes beyond the current standard (maybe HTML5 CSS4?) allow for this, but I'm not sure. I think that without factoring in BOTH screen size and resolution, html/css will struggle in the long run (though it's wonderfully open!).