Nostradamus (was Re: FO. lists as tables)

[politics - please skip if uninterested]

At 10:42 AM 10/14/99 +0100, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>Steve Schafer writes:
> > On Wed, 13 Oct 1999 15:28:36 -0700, you wrote:
> > 
> > >XSL is committed to keeping property values compatible.
> > 
> > Why is that? CSS2's "font" property is a mess.
>
>I expect the W3C's political decision that XSL had to be compatible
>with CSS will ultimately be seen as the reason why XSL FO failed to
>take off.
>
>Sebastian "nostradamus" Rahtz

Funny thing.  I always expected the XSL community's initial hostility to
CSS and failure to build bridges early on to be the reason why XSL FO
failed to take off. All the claims that "there isn't competition, so we
should be able to do it better than they did" rang pretty hollow, to say
the least.  The later decision to reconcile the two specs may have muddied
the waters for XSL, but I suspect it may have saved XSL FOs from becoming
yet another different spec no one wanted to implement.

But heck, I've already come to the conclusion that I'm 180 degrees away
from Sebastian "nostradamus" Rahtz's postions, and probably at least 160
degrees away from most of the people who find XSL FOs compelling.
Fortunately, all of the real Nostradamus' predictions are conveniently
vague, open to differing and even opposite conclusions.  So I'll take the
opposite tack, fed up once again with the level of whining about CSS that
is a popular but thankfully occasional feature on this list.

We now return to your regular programming...


Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
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http://www.simonstl.com


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