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

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

Marcus Carr writes:

 > Keeping in mind that you may also expect the look of the output to change in
 > some ways, possibly making it impractical to do things like send page ranges
 > out, as the boundaries may have changed. I'd need a pretty good reason to
 > switch once a year.

yes, so would I. but I could prepare a document here using
FO-engine-1, then send it and my stylesheet to a publisher who used
FO-engine-2, and expect there to be some relationship between my draft
and their formatted result. They might well change font and page size,
so all bets are off as regards breaking, but I could reasonably assume
that lists would stay as lists, and tables would look like tables. To
that extent, FO would take over the role that RTF has today, which is
not inconsiderable. And I think everyone would agree that we'd like to
dump RTF!

 > > Lord, thats a depressing outlook. We are dictated to by what *computer
 > > people* feel can be accomplished????
 > 
 > I guess that depends on what you consider computer people to be, but
 > generally, yes, I feel that's the case. Don't you?

if by `computer people', we mean `architects', then yes. I suspect
that in practice it means `computer programmers', ie `builders'. which
*is* depressing.

Sebastian


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