RE: Can browsers show text? I don't think so!

From: Michael Jansson (mjan@em2-solutions.com)
Date: Wed Jul 03 2002 - 04:18:57 EDT


Hi Murray,

Well, even CSS 1 supports fine grained positioning (e.g. margins, padding,
position and sizes in units like mm, etc.) I don't see a need for the format
to support better positioning than that. Tab support can and probably should
be supported at a higher level in a DTP tool and not necessarily in the used
page layout format.

HTML/CSS can actually be used much like other popular dtp format, such as
PDF. For example, there is a tool called Myrmidon that works much like
PDFWriter, e.g. your "print" from your favorite DTP app and get a HTML
document.

Regards,
em2 Solutions
Michael Jansson

> Michael Jansson says:
>
> > There are no technical reasons for why css/html4/xhtml can
> not produce
> every bit as high quality
> > as any other page layout format.
>
>
> Sadly this is currently far from the case. HTML/CSS even
> including CSS3
> is far from a professional document publishing format. It doesn't even
> have center/right/decimal tabs and tab leaders, which virtually all WP
> systems have. The list of DTP omissions goes on and on. Defining their
> own XMLs is the direction that WP systems are going in for
> interchange.
> XSLT can be used to translate between these XMLs to the
> extent that the
> features are translatable. XHTML/CSS is only used as a fallback for
> browsers.
>
> Which isn't to say that XHTML/CSS isn't cool. It is. But
> currently it's
> a weak DTP format at best.
>
> Murray
>



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