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Jirka Kosek said:
> 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.
Very interesting data, at level of CSS?
> > author vs client rendering preferences...).
>
> This should be solved prior generating FO, for example during
> transformation from XML to FO.
And how can client modify that previous transformation?
>
> 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.)
Even no being the "correct tool". Javascript is by far more popular than
XSLT. However, you are not noticing that XSLT canot be used for dynamic
transformations of online docs. e4x is a kind of javascript for
transformation and manipulation of XML data. It is cheap, very simple to
understand and can do tasks that XSLT cannot (e.g. dynamical pages). It is
very novel but is already implemented in last Firefox.
Still your criticism is not against CSS. Note also that you could
implement a CSS-T for trasnformations. Whereas i see a declining on
interest in XSL-FO i see an increase on CSS.
> 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.
Well, this does not matter really, does it?
>> "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.
Then you may be claiming that something like
<font ...>my title</font>
<fo:block>my title</fo:block>
was harmfull 7 years ago but is not today. Have you noticed the this year
plans to substutition of SVG by a semantic oriented approach. Most of
rationale for the elimination of SVG from the web are the same that
rationale for the elimination of XSL-FO from the web 7 years ago...
>> 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.
Have you noted Adobe said here? Have you noted that above section is a
extract from a recent article i have cited in this list. Also its author
was living on a different planet. Well, maybe they (and me) are living
outside XML-planet.
Juan R.
Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)
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