[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re "Move to Divide the Question"
1) For the CSS versus XSL debate, see W3C's webpage for positioning of the two tools. Vendors I've heard have been saying "We like some parts of both of these, and will use the one that fits a particular problem while waiting for both of them to evolve and -- possibly, eventually, maybe -- converge." My own best understanding is that CSS is good for back-annotating an existing document without changing its basic structure, and has the advantage of clearly defined "cascading" behavior, while XSL is much better able to handle changes that _do_ involve substantially rearranging and restructuring the information. Which is best thus depends on what you're trying to do to your document. The overlap may increase over time, but for now either use the one that suits your particular task, or provide feedback to the designers about how it could better do so. 2) Re the need for formatting objects: This is the abstract markup debate in yet another guise. HTML really is both overly specific and not specific enough as a markup language for directing rendering, as far as I'm concerned... in large part because it started out as a minimal abstract markup and then had lots of concrete detail dumped into it on an ad-hoc basis. I would Really Like to see a richer language for expressing document formatting at the conceptual level -- an abstraction of formatting, which the data-level abstractions could be transformed into on their way to print -- and that's the niche that FO's are supposed to fit. Of course they then have to be further elaborated/transformed to produce the final rendering; they're not intended to be the final form, but directives to a processor which will in turn produce the final form. This is a useful reference back toward our GML "document-compilation" roots. (Yes, you could transform directly into directives describing precisely how to lay out the page. But an intermediate layer -- one which states formatting intent but can be rearranged by the formatter to fit the media available -- strikes me as a good thing. Of course, if you don't need it for your problem, you'd simply ignore it.) 3) Re dividing the question into a transformation language and a formatting language: I'm _almost_ in favor. My main hesitation is that I think FOs could be one good "use case" for making sure that the transforms really are rich enough. There's something to be said for having a testcase actually built into the design process. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research Unless stated otherwise, all opinions are solely those of the author. XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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