Abstractions
Zeldman opines today, “What’s amazing and unprecedented about CSS layout is that it?s completely abstracted from the data it presents.”
No argument about “amazing.” But “unprecedented?” Far be it from me to gig the great Zeldman who has taught me much, but I must assume that statement was just a momentary lapsus, er, not linguae exactly—let us say lapsus digitorum.
Print-publishing workflows have understood abstraction for quite some time, though this fact has admittedly been swept under the carpet by WYSIWYG page-layout tools.
First a manuscript goes to an editor. The editor goes through the manuscript and marks up each block with its type—heads are marked as such, paragraphs, lists, table parts, and so on. Sounds a lot like abstracting out a data model, no? And it takes place completely independently of the appearance of the text in the finished book. Said appearance hasn’t even been determined yet, in fact.
The list of unique block types then shoots over to a book designer, who puts together a design spec detailing precisely how each block is supposed to look. When the manuscript is keyed, each block is marked in some way or other with its type.
Ways differ. A few publishers use real SGML or XML markup. Some publishers use markup-like tags of various sorts. Some publishers use word-processing styles. Doesn’t matter. My point is, these block-types are placed explicitly into the data, and move with it.
The typesetter then uses the information about the block types to set up and apply a stylesheet, so that s/he doesn’t have to write out the same formatting instructions umptillion times for the umptillion ordinary paragraphs in the book.
If this sounds an awful lot like the way markup and CSS get put together in a website, guess what? It is an awful lot like it, which is why it bothers me no end that print publishers are still so freaked about markup. They don’t need to change to accommodate markup nearly as much as they think they do.
And it wouldn’t hurt markup experts to learn something of the nuts-and-bolts of print publishing, either.