|One point I came across while reading it: if we are goiung to have
|adjustable border styles (i.e. border.style,) we should consider the
|following possibilities:
|
| ________________
| | ______________ Thin border inside thin border
| | |
|
| ________________
| |
| | ############# Thick border inside thin border
| | #
|
| ################
| #
| # ############# Thick border inside thick border
| # #
|
| ################
| #
| # ___________
| # |
|
|(Tin-0in-thick)
|
|(eh, in.)
|
|we should consider adjustable interborder spacing, and also spacing
|between borders and the text blocks they affect... although the latter can
|probably be set using the text container's margins.
I agree we need to allow for different border styles, but the question
is how many (and how detailed) parameters there should be in the style
sheet.
There will of course be some way to set the offset, color, style, and
width. But the number of possible styles is very large. There probably
needs to be a small set of 5 to 20 styles that a formatter needs to
recognize, plus a mechanism for substituting styles, in case a
formatter doesn't implement some of them.
The designer can help the formatter by giving a list of alternatives,
in decreasing order of priority:
border-style = wavy dotted -- use wavy if available, otherwise dotted
But depending on the style, other parameters could be added as well:
- for double border, thick-in-thin, thin-in-thick: width of each
line and space between them
- for dotted lines: the sizes and positions of the dots
- for wavy lines: the wave length and line thickness
- etc.
It may be possible to allow for these parameters in the syntax, with
the proviso that very few, if any, formatters will actually use them.
Bert
--
Bert Bos Alfa-informatica
<bert@let.rug.nl> Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
<http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/> Postbus 716, NL-9700 AS GRONINGEN