Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

[Wendell Piez]
> Despite a real interest (this is just the kind of "soft" problem I
> feel comfortable with) and wanting to interject more than once, I
> haven't posted on "XSL Formatting Objects Considered Harmful." But I
> just got a pointer to a ZDNet story, which suggests that the
> concerns of this thread may soon be of more than casual interest, at
> least to U.S. implementors:

Wendell,

This story introduces exactly zero new factors into XSL's design.  The
Federal government is behind the W3C, which established the Web
Accessibility Initiative two years ago.  The WAI is a top-level
activity domain at the W3C, and has input and review responsibilities
for all W3C activities.  If they object strongly to XSL, it will
probably not be promoted to Recommendation status.

This whole debate is based on the notion of abuse of FOs, which is a
real possibility, but one that can't be eliminated with any data
delivery method.  The same argument can be made about any technology,
from guns to UNIX to medicines to bandsaws.  Any tool with sufficient
power to be useful has sufficient power to be harmful if mis-used;
it's a risk we take as primates.

-Chris
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