Re: Stepping back, part two...

[Guy Murphy]
> Giving voice to an admittedly childish, emotive response (that I
> would never be so rude as to predujice somebody actively with), I
> feel XSL is geting bent out of shape in order to appease those
> wishing it to facilitate print. The childish repsonse to this is
> "You've got you're tools, now let me get mine". Print has SGML and
> DSSSL, and I sort of see XML and XSL as the Web equivelant.  I think
> somehow, as a Web designer I feel that my tools are being hijacked
> by print considerations.

My childish response to this is a big fat raspberry.

Print considerations *started* the XSL effort; attempts to limit its
scope to HTML transformation are closer to hijacking than are attempts
to keep to its original mission.

And the print world *doesn't* have DSSSL, at least not in practice.
The main problem with DSSSL is that it requires, in some places, a
"tight coupling" between the processor reading the stylesheet and the
processor actually producing formatted output.  Some things in the
former require knowledge of what's going on in the latter.  As a
result, there are no implementations that I know of that implement
these complex objects.  At best, "intelligent" flow objects can be
created and passed downstream, as Jade does with the RTF and TeX
back-ends.  One goal of the XSL effort is to make implementation
possible without that tight coupling, by giving the formatting objects
themselves a higher degree of intelligence, or the ability to express
their own formatting constraints to the formatter without
communication back to the stylesheet processor.

And once again, you've fallen prey to the false dichotomy between Web
and print.  Just because the *current* state is that Web formatting
[expletive deleted] doesn't mean that good formatting should be the exclusive
province of dead-tree output.  Instead, push vendors and developers to
bring you to the point where you can have "print" formatting on your
screen, and sensitive to the environment you've established (unlike
PDF).

-Chris
-- 
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