CSS in device-independent publishing

Bert Bos

25 September 2002
Device-independent authoring techniques workshop,
St.-Leon-Rot, Germany

An example to explain the model

Use case: hotel information

• Name, amenities, motto
• Address, phone, fax
• Photos, logo
• Maps
• Reservation form

Goals

• Accessible from different devices
• Easy to author/maintain

You bookmarked in the office, but now you're on the road.

Problem: the author has only one device...

Solution

Trust W3C :-)

• Text → HTML/XHTML
• Bitmaps → PNG, JPEG
• Logos → SVG
• Forms → XForms
• Layout → CSS
• "Glue" → URLs & metadata
• Metadata → MIME, media queries

etc. for sound, video, animation...

In diagram

URLs + metadata

Author's responsability

• Don't lie
  i.e., use formats as intended

Optional:

• Alternative bitmaps (bigger, smaller, cropped)
• Alternative styles
• Alternative...

Author's responsability ends here.

How come?

... "author's responsability ends here"?

• All the information is there
• Machine readable
• Therefore client can adapt as needed

And in practice?

Hmm...

• CSS: little support for paged output ("cards")
• CSS: no multimodal output (sound+vision)
• XHTML: still being developed; XForms...

Author not perfect

• Books & tools misrepresent HTML
  • page layout language!?

Challenges for CSS

• Better paged display
• Interaction, navigation
• Multimodal
  • Visual, background audio, sound fx
  • Visual + speech
• Dynamic rendering
  • page at a time, line at a time
  • overlays, pop-ups