[osis-core] styles

[Harry Plantinga]

Andrew Proper and I are still having trouble getting our Microsoft Word 
2003 osis-import XSLT to read in two different files, because of the way 
Word/XSLT handles temporary directories.

We are currently considering the following solution for storing a 
document stylesheet inside the OSIS file itself. Tell us if it's too 
horrible to contemplate:

Add an element in the header of the document, something like this:

<html:style type="text/css">
  p   {text-indent: 0.5in; margin-top: 12pt}
</html:style>

Of course, it will be possible to store the OSIS document and the 
stylesheet separately and combine them into one or split a combined file 
into two with simple utilities. This is just for getting the document 
and styling into and out of Word.

------------------------

The other issue is that CSS, not being XML syntax, is easy to generate 
but hard to parse for other purposes. It will be hard to read in a CSS 
stylesheet and parse it with an XSLT. So CSS may in fact not be appropriate.

It turns out that XSL-FO doesn't really seem appropriate to us either. 
It is intended for describing formatted blocks and pages, not standoff 
formatting per se.

We could make up our own XML syntax for the CSS stylesheet, as the CCEL 
already does. (See the stylesheets in /ccel/c/calvin/calcom01.xml, for 
example -- one CSS, one an XML representation of CSS.) Or, we could just 
duplicate the WordML stylesheet.  Any other suggestions for an 
XML-format stylesheet language we could use?

Or shall we embed all the formatting in <hi> elements? [WARNING: THAT 
WAS ONLY AN ATTEMPT AT HUMOR]

-Harry Plantinga