Don’t call me DOM

The CSS Working Group is developing its CSS 3 technology as a set of modules ; each module describes a specific subset of properties, syntax rules, processing model, etc.

Given the relatively high number of said modules (24 at this day), and knowing that there are interdependencies between them, it becomes quickly hard to follow what’s going on and in which order.

To help get a clearer view of the CSS landscape, I decided to fire up my XSLT gun armed with a bit of RDF…

1. a spidering XSLT style sheet gets from the RDF list of W3C Technical Reports those that were produced by the CSS Working Group
2. for each of these documents (after some heuristics to filter the CSS2 and CSS1 documents), it looks for a section titled “Dependencies” and extracts the list of CSS modules listed in it
3. the resulting RDF list, after some hand massaging, can then be converted in a visual graph, using the RDF Validator

The resulting PNG image, while far from being perfect, does give a pretty nice overview of what’s going in CSS3 land… That was the easy part; now is time to interpret it!

(see also Ryan Lee’s TR references tracker)