Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

I wrote:

 > > If servers output XFO instead of (X)HTML (or other globally known,
 > > abstract formats) harm is done.
 > 
 > It would make absolutely no sense to do this.

No? Not even if you wanted to create a semantic firewall?

 > Given this, realizing a document as an FO document would provide little
 > value to a client browser because the browser would still have to do the
 > layout and placement of areas within the regions and also deal with the
 > non-linear aspects of the flows.  If a browser could do all this, then
 > applying the tree construction portion of XSL should be trivial.

Yes, XTL is trivial compared to XFO and I don't think we will see
browsers that support XFO and not XTL. On the generator side, however,
I think we will see tools outputting XFO as they output PDF today.

 > Given the above, I don't think we should worry too much about people
 > shipping FO documents around.  It really isn't practical.

Did you try my demo described in [1]? In what way isn't it practical?

[1] http://www.operasoftware.com/people/howcome/1999/foch.html#demo

-h&kon

Håkon Wium Lie             http://www.operasoftware.com/people/howcome
howcome@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                      simply a better browser



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