Re: Venting

[Marcus Groeber <mgroeber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Francois Belanger wrote:

> Au contraire! separating the two components would probably mean the
> selection part of XSL would be completed much faster as it would not have
> to wait for the FO to be defined and put to task. As the selection part
> is being used and tested everyday by member of this group among others,
> it's getting fast near completion IMHO.

I agree with that prediction - in a way, I see the danger that FOs may
turn out to be the much more immature part of the standard when it is
given "recommendation" status in August, simply because the
transformation part has already been put through its paces by many
implementors and even more users. On the other hand there are not
exactly that many FO implementations around (and certainly none that
claims "full conformance to section 3 of the specs") by which people
could judge the pros and cons of the current draft...

Of course, having both in one rec would increase the pressure on browser
makers to implement FOs in order to be able to claim "100% compliance".
Then again, the rendering model of FOs may turn out to be so alien to
the internal rendering models used in the browsers (I wouldn't be
suprised if the first real FO support came in the form of a 3rd party
plugin...) that manufacturers might simply choose to go for
"kind-of-you-know-what-I-mean" conformance, picking only the parts that
are easy enough to handle, maybe not even going for full transformation
support since they have no need to strive for conformance anyway.

I could even see FOs getting a life of their own as an XML-based page
description language that doesn't necessarily have to be generated by
XSL transformation at all. Not sure if this is really a good thing
because it would have a lot of overlap with things like PDF, TeX or RTF
(then again, none of these can be generated directly through XSL), but
splitting the two would open up that possibility to "the market" as
well.

Just my 0.02 EUR...

ciao marcus




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