RE: The beginning of xslt?

David Carlisle wrote:

>I think this misses the original intention of XML as being "SGML for 
>the web". The intention was for >a lighter weight version of SGML such 
>that documents in their original (SGML/XML form) could be served 
>directly over the web rather than having to "downgrade" then to html or

>postscript as was common at the time (and still now:-)

The question that has always bothered me is whether or not the original
intention of XSL:FO was to output to a variety of clients (including web
browsers, mobile phones, etc.)and not just to print? ....And that
perhaps it was just a question of waiting for the browser/software
vendors to build clients that could read formatting objects? 

It does seem a shame that for the moment that we are restricted to:

a) predominantly using XSLT to transform to (X)HTML and 'downgrade' for
the web
b) only using XSL:FO within the paradigm of print

If we look forward to the future, are we still going to be writing
stylesheets that output HTML in 5 years' time, or are the W3C going to
attempt to marry the potential richness of the formatting-object concept
and the role that HTML currently serves to the browsing public?

It still seems rather ironic to me that although IE6/Mozilla currently
support client-side transformation of XML, that transform goes on to
produce a HTML result which is then presumably read by the browser's
HTML rendering engine before being drawn on screen. This clearly can't
be optimal or indeed the way forward in the long term.


Any ideas?


Andy








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