Re: The beginning of xslt?

>How can the same people be responsible for both XSLT and XSL-FO? 

Partly because largely the same group of people had previously been
responsible for dsssl which has similar aims, with a similar result.


  Style sheets occur at the phase between a designer and a 
  finished artist, or between a designer and a typesetter, but generally, 
  structure isn't communicated within a style sheet. Structure is decided at 
  the beginning, with thumbnail sketches or marker roughs. 



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:-)

That vision required the development of a matching styling language that
would be applied -late- (ie, in the final viewing client) that was
capable of rearranging a source XML document into a presentation form,
so transformation was (is) seen as an integral part of styling, rather
than a css-like view of styling where you are just decorating a tree
with styling properties.

David

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