Re: Notes on Comparison of XSL FO Renderers

Tokushige Kobayashi <koba@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote at Sun, 19 Oct 2003 18:48:47 +0900:
...
> Overall, implementation level is as follows:
> 
>  XSL Formatter V2.5: 79%
>  XSL Formatter V3.0: 70%
>  FOP 0.20.5: 46%
>  XEP V3.6:  74%
>  xmlroff: 39%
> 
> There should be many notes for each implementation, I suppose.
> More important is incompatibility issue. XSL-FO specification
> is sometimes implimented depending on different understanding.

Simplistic, single-quantity percentages don't tell enough of the
implementation story and could be an impediment to people considering
adopting XSL.

A single percentage for implementation level is too broad a
categorisation to be useful.  The XSL 1.0 Recommendation defines three
conformance levels, and it would be more useful to present the
implementation levels broken up by conformance level.  Showing that
multiple implementations have 100% or close to 100% for 'Basic'
conformance would be a good thing for boosting public confidence in
XSL interoperability.  Hiding the common level of 'Basic' conformance
shows XSL interoperability as worse than it really is and will
discourage any people who won't adopt XSL unless there's
interoperability.

There's also many aspects of XSL formatting that don't fit the neat
categorisation of percentage of properties implemented.  For example,
support for Thai, the ability to use expressions in any property
value, and the ability to handle lengths expressed as percentages of
the current IPD or BPD don't figure in the conformance section of the
Recommendation, but they would each be important to some people.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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XML Technology Center - Dublin
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