Bruce B. Salem

On Recent Weather

Random thoughts for today. The style for this page matches the weather for today, clear, blue sky, and, thank God, or your favorite myth, cooler than it has been here within recent days. I changed the background to wheat on 09/05. I'm not sure what that says about the weather, maybe it says that the season if for harvest, and judging by the plums and necturines for sale at the Farmer's Market, today, or at Trader Joe's, it is probably good. What is more, today, September 3, 2010, in California, we have absolutely nothing to complain about as concerns the weather. As compared to what weather this season has brought to most of the rest of the US., and is what is happening today on the East Coast with Hurricane Earl, we have not a thing to carp about. Update: Sept. 4, the hurricane was not the threat it might have been, having been downgraded to a tropical storm. Still that has a punch that will be directed at Long Island and Cape Cod. And by 09/05 that didn't turn out to be the case. The tropical storm had veered east and hit Nova Scotia instead, and did little more than break some tree branches. Oh, it has been a cooler than normal Spring and Summer, here. but that is all we need be concerned about as compared to the extreme weather elsewhere in this country, let alone the world, where the effects of global warming dominate the new records set in temperture as well as rainfall, such as in the Monsoon in Pakistan, this year.

This is XML with CSS

This document is going to be rendered HTML from an XML source through a CSS stylesheet. As such it is static, suitable for a book where text is to be rendered but once. I have styled XML before, but needed to go to the depths of using XSLT because I needed to generate a Table of Contents on the fly each time a new section header was added. I was able to style the root element with the global style for the page. The example i had did not specify the units for the margin-top style and so did not produce any spacing between the paragraph blocks. So, explicit units did work. the rest of the stylesheet parameters appeared to have worked as expected. I really do like the serifs on the big paragraph initials. The DOM inspector in the browser is pretty good at explaining errors in the XML. There is no DTD for this XML as yet. It will be interesting to see if my web host cares about that. They could insist that all XML documents have a data defination or schema. I assume that if I wanted to style HTML elements I would have to include the appropriate namespace in the declarations, to get the tags that carry special fonts. Although, the browser might do that for me whether or not that is truely portable. I could try it and the worst that would happen is that the DOM inspector complains. It just ignored the HTML tags I inserted. I think that I should include the XHTML namespace, as I did recently to do XML inside an HTML page. I tried to change the text color of this paragraph setting either an id or a class as a attribute to the value of "green" and it had no effect. Setting the color within a unique XML element did change the color. And checking the color value, by setting it elsewhere did work. Looks like a bug to me. Moving the color spec. from the root element to the para element didn't work. The only thing left to try is to make the para instance in which I want the color change to be a unique XML element, like <pragreen> and not use the class or id mechanism at all since it ovbiously doesn't work. The fault could be mine for not including a namespace that is truely needed. But until I figure that out, it is a workaround worth trying. That finally worked as I had wanted! And I made it a red-letter day by nesting the <red> element inside the <emph> element! I just noticed that the first letter cuteness in the <para> element is not implemented in the <paragreen> style. I guess that I have to replicate the pseudo-element as per that element. And that worked! Remember that all of this is implemented only in the style sheet for XML, the HTML needed is generated by the interaction, and the blowser doesn't show me the HTML at all. It doesn't need to. The canvas tools in HTML5 and the ability to save the results as images from the demos I have seen gives me the idea to generate abstract background patterns that can be used on either XML or HTML pages. I should be able to set a background image in the same way as I specify a background color in the style sheet.