First, it was never intended that the CSS 3 attr() function be used to set any and all CSS values using e.g. <foo font="Helvetica" text-align="-xpp-ragged-right" font-variant="small-caps" ...>.

When a "string" value is used as the value-type of an argument to the CSS 3 attr() function, it is (or was) specified that the string value not be re-parsed by the CSS processor, it ends up being both ugly, error prone and inefficient.

That said, it is perfectly reasonable that Chris wants to set text align to left or right depending on the value of an x-register.

So why not this:

sub check{

. . .

if ($notest == 1){

$X->xppattr('align', 'string', '', 'center');

} else {

$X->xppattr('align', 'string', '', 'left');

}

and in the CSS

para[xpp\:align='center'] { text-align: center; }

para[xpp\:align='left'] { text-align: left; }

In my opinion, this is a bit more readable than setting Fred to '9' or '10'.

The real reason(s) for implementing the CSS 3 attr() function in XPP are:

1) To address the "tabular problem in CSS", i.e. that fact that not all composition values are restored properly if you have e.g. a CALS table with an <entry> element with embedded tags which change e.g. text alignment, font weight, font size, and your t5 spec is setup to restore body/header c/p values on each <entry>. See cals_t5.css spec. By using the xppattr xymacro, it is possible to "save" composition values as attributes on the MLH (markup language header), and then you can set font-size, font-width, text-align using the CSS 3 attr() function.

2) To facilitate QA testing, where you may want to specify c/p values using attributes for data-driven XML testing.

3) For cases like Chris mentioned, as shown above.

That's my 2p's worth, for today anyway.

Tony

Thanks Tony for the detailed reply. This looks more elegant that using numbers so I will try this!

Thanks Tony for the detailed reply. This looks more elegant that using numbers so I will try this!