Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Hi Simon.

I appreciate that your documents are of a simple form, and are in fact
documents. So the simple solution is as you point out is don't transform.

You must however be aware that rendering from simple documents is the
smallest portion of the challenges that face the Web designer and
developer, whether constructing the framework for a large website or web
app, or aggregating data for delivery as a document.

It has been said many times in the past, that XSL is not seeking to replace
CSS (or indeed XHTML), but is being designed to meet the needs of problem
domains for which XHTML+CSS are not up to the task for. These domains are
not just specialist printing requirements, but any large complex and
interactive Web presentation.

In short, nobody is forcing you to use XSL, you already have XML+CSS. And
correspondingly, please don't try and insist that XML+CSS are enough for my
needs :)

Cheers

     Guy.






xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 04/28/99 04:50:30 PM

To:   xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc:    (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID)
Subject:  Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful





[SNIP]
I have no interest in converting my XML documents to HTML for transmission
over the Web.  While I'll do it for as long as is necessary to support old
browsers, transformation for the sake of transformation isn't my idea of
smart processing.  Annotation is quite adequate for the relatively
straightforward documents I create, and doesn't make the same processing
demands.  If I have XML documents and a CSS style sheet for presenting
them, I'd really rather not go to the trouble of ramming them through an
extra level of transformation to turn them into junk (aka HTML or FOs.)
[SNIP]





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