xml-dev - Re: Which browser supports FO also

[Steve Harris <sharris@primus.com>]

Didier PH Martin <martind@netfolder.com> writes:

[...]

> The actual paradigm is that HTML and later on XHTML is used as a
> rendering language. It has the merit to support the billions of
> documents out there.  And these documents are already encoded in
> HTML.

[ ...]

> XSLFO is a revolution not an evolution from the actual state of
> facts. XSLT used as a transformation tool and XHTML as a rendering
> language is an evolution.

Didier, you and Jon Bosak should have a talk! He gave a speech at
XTech last year that pleaded for us to not give up on FOs. FOs do not
replace HTML. Rather, HTML just becomes one possible output back-end
from an FO processor. Granted, you would lose some fine control of the
HTML production, but for many applications that loss would be fine
when weighed against the benefit of maintaining a single abstract
formatting specification.

I understand that for now we'll make use of the tools we have, but we
haven't decided that today's capabilities prove XSL's full promise to
unnecessary. [Open]Jade shows it can be done.

It's troubling to see so many self-congratulatory "We made it!"
proclamations around XSLT, when much of the XSLT->HTML work I see
looks way more complex than a comparable Perl script could be -
without achieving the format independence that could make that
complexity worthwhile.

-- 
Steven E. Harris
Primus Knowledge Solutions, Inc.
http://www.primus.com

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