ArborText begins Cedar project

January 10, 1998

Seybold Report on Internet Publishing
Vol 2, No 5

ArborText has begun working on Cedar, the code name for an XSL style sheet editor for Adept. Shown off the show floor, Cedar was demonstrated with a prototype version of style sheet support in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Cedar provides menu access to all the expected style parameters, such as font, size, color, indentation and justification. ArborText could show all these, as well as support for suppression of text, reordering of text and automatic numbering.

The product will also incorporate more sophisticated features, including construction rules, style rules, macros and scripts. Styles can be named and stored, then reused.

Cedar will be able to analyze a document and create a list of tags. This list then becomes the basis for style sheet creation. (This is useful because XML documents don’t necessarily have a DTD, which could otherwise be used as the source for such a list.)

A beta version of Cedar will be available for downloading on ArborText’s Web site (www.arbortext.com) in early 1998. While we are glad to see ArborText moving quickly to support the prototype standard, until it provides some on-screen feedback for the styles created, the style sheet editor remains too abstract for the mainstream market.