What are we calling this?

[msrosenberg]

It's not clear to me what name was settled on. Is it nexss, tss, or treess? I just want to make sure we're consistent.

nexss sounds like "nexus" and seems to tie the concept to closely to nexml. treess is more likely to be pronounced as "treez" than "tree-es-es", which may or may not be considered a good thing.

[jimallman]

On Sep 17, 2014, at 5:43 PM, Michael Rosenberg notifications@github.com wrote:

nexss sounds like "nexus" and seems to tie the concept to closely to nexml. treess is more likely to be pronounced as "treez" than "tree-es-es", which may or may not be considered a good thing.

+1 on both counts, but willing to play along...

=jimA=

Jim Allman
Interrobang Digital Media
http://www.ibang.com/
(919) 649-5760

[arlin]

this was based on an issue that came up during stand-ups. Cody suggested that the treess name was too broad, because this is not a style-sheet for trees in general-- there is no way it can be used to style a Newick tree, which lacks the necessary hooks. You need to be able to declare structural elements that implicate content within the doc, that the style-sheet can reference. By analogy, CSS is for styling HTML, and NeXSS is for styling NeXML.

[msrosenberg]

That was explained to me, but I'm actually not sure I entirely agree (I had a brief conversation with the phylostylotastic group about this). We absolutely can use nexss/tss to style Newick trees, only in a limited fashion. Base properties that reflect the tree as a whole are as equally applicable to a Newick tree as a tree in NeXML format (e.g., background canvas, tree drawing shape style, line styles, tip label style, etc.). Elements which are not found within a Newick tree cannot easily be styled (e.g., assigning properties to a particular branch or node), but this is no different from css designations that are not found within a particular HTML page. NeXML currently offers the richest styling possibilities, but not the only ones.

I also like the idea that there could be alternative tree file formats that are invented/used but that could still make use of the tree style sheet designation, without necessarily being NeXML. I'm not convinced absolutely tying the tree styling concept to the tree file format is the best idea.

By analogy, CSS is primarily used for styling html, but there are many things which are not, strictly speaking html, yet which are styled through CSS, such as markdown documents and certain ebook formats (e.g., epub).

If there is a consensus we are going with nexss, then I'll stick with that; in the conversation we had earlier, it wasn't entirely clear a final decision had been made, which is why I raised the issue.

[daisieh]

I think the current place we left it is that we're defining "NexSS" right now, which may or may not be a subset of a more robust or more encompassing future "TreeSS."

[daisieh]

A future TreeSS should not break NexSS, but we are not currently attempting to address, say, standalone Newick trees without a conversion to NeXML.

[msrosenberg]

that's fair

[jimallman]

We absolutely can use nexss/tss to style Newick trees, only in a limited fashion. Base properties that reflect the tree as a whole are as equally applicable to a Newick tree as a tree in NeXML format (e.g., background canvas, tree drawing shape style, line styles, tip label style, etc.).

@msrosenberg, we arrived at the same conclusion in the Chicago workshop, and furthermore agreed that TreeSS is a solid name that's not too closely associated with NEXML, etc. So going forward, TreeSS will be the name (still updating docs and READMEs to reflect this...)