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juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com wrote:
> XSL-FO did born for the web, after transformed for off-line usage in
> printing (in batch mode?) because lacking adequate properties (incremental
> rendering,
I know at least one implementation which supports incremental rendering
of XSL-FO, so this feature is not lacking in FO, but might be lacking in
some of its implementations.
> author vs client rendering preferences...).
This should be solved prior generating FO, for example during
transformation from XML to FO.
> Last time CSS begin
> to be more popular for printing also.
>
> [http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom]
>
> with some recent profesional CSS formatters arriving this year, e.g. this
> one against XSL-FO:
>
> [http://www.realobjects.com/News-Article.793+M51571b033ca.0.html]
CSS will never be good enough for creating print output from arbitrary
XML, because CSS doesn't allow document to be transformed before
styling. You can't produce table of contents, calculate sum of table
column or generete new line with table heading in CSS. This is very easy
to implement in XSLT + FO. (Yes, and Javascript is really not right tool
for such tasks if you work with complex grammars like DocBook, TEI or DITA.)
> Hum. It is not clear for what XSL-FO was designed not for what people want
> (or wait) use it.
I don't think that there would be several commercial implementations of
XSL-FO if there are doubts about for what to use XSL-FO.
> "While one can hope that Web browsers will one day know how to directly
> display data marked up with XSL formatting objects, for now an additional
> step is necessary in which the output document is further transformed into
> some other format, such as Adobe’s PDF."
>
> [http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/chapters/ch18.html]
>
> However the usage of XSL-FO for the web is very harmfull (and contrary to
> 'safe' web design guidelines)
>
> [http://people.opera.com/howcome/1999/foch.html]
Citing 7 years old resources in Internet and XML time is not very good
ammunition.
> Therein lays another example of this schizophrenia involving all things
> XML. Is the prime purpose print, or is it electronic presentation? OK,
> it’s both. So can one standardized approach really address the cross-media
> challenge? Or will it meet the same fate as every other product or system
> that claims to handle crossmedia? Failure. Adobe itself in the latest
> version of InDesign essentially admits that the cross-media dream had not
> worked out as previously expected. The cross-media feature of InDesign CS
> is to bundle up all the print text and graphics and ship them over to
> GoLive, a Web publishing application.
You are probably living on a different planet. There are thousand of
people who produce cross-media content each day. They create
presentational neutral content in XML and then use various stylesheets
to transform this single source to different target formats like HTML
(via XSLT) or PDF (via XSL-FO). XSL (XSLT + FO) was designed exactly for
such usage scenario.
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Jirka Kosek e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz http://www.kosek.cz
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