xml-dev - Re: Future of Formatting Objects (XSL/FO)

[Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>]

Marcus Carr writes:

 > But now we're talking about a package consisiting of a syntax and
 > an application. You need to
 > feed something to the engine, but what's the advantage is in
 > feeding it FO over a proprietary syntax?

so that you can switch engines. not every day, of course, but a switch
from FO engine A to FO engine B once a year would be reasonable.

 > Sure, just as an analyst might communicate the design of stucture
 > using a DTD, knowing that the eventual mechanism used for parsing
 > will be a schema. (I do this myself.) It may be a
 > good thing, but the lack of specification syntax hasn't exactly
 > stopped publishing in the past.

No, but the lack of a common style description language *has* been a
practical irritation. Translating designers written specs into code is
a hit and miss affair, in my experience.

 > Do you really believe that someone's going to create something that
 > you compare favourably to TeX? 
yes, I do, sooner or later.

 > I expect that David Megginson's posting may represent the view a
 > large percentage of the XML industry, that is, allow typesetting
 > standards to degrade to what computer people feel
 > can reasonably be accomplished.

Lord, thats a depressing outlook. We are dictated to by what *computer
people* feel can be accomplished???? 

 >  If so, the day an FO application comes out that does as good
 > a typesetting job as Microsoft Word, victory will be joyfully declared.

Oh well, then you can shout. XEP is already there. Doing better than
Word is like shooting fish in a barrel

Sebastian




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