Re: Venting 2

[Chris Lilley <chris@xxxxxx>]

Paul Prescod wrote:

> Anyhow my real point for this second venting is that the fact that the
> formatting language is not officially specified *as a language* means that
> tools like FOP are in a standardization grey zone. They take in a language
> implicitly, not explicitly described in XSL and convert it into a
> rendition.

FO isn't a "language" unless you also consider HTML, DocBook, etc to to
be langauges. Its an XSML namespace, though. It should be possible to
write a DTD or other schema for it. I don't se it being "implicit" in
the XSL spec, it seems quite explicit to me.

> 
> Practically speaking we can infer a correct behavior for the
> specification, but technically speaking there is no provision for the FO
> output of an XSL processor being the input for any other type of software.

The processor is not required to serialise the FO - to write it out to a
file (it can, but itr need not). That is not the same thing

> That software has no official standing.

That software is called a formatter. If the software that generates the
FOs is also the software that consumes them, then it makes no sense to
write out the FOs to a file. If the formatter is on a different computer
than the software that generated the FOs - for exampl, if the formatter
is in a printer - then it does make sense to serialise it out.

--
Chris


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