Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 19:29:43 +0100
XSL List--

Despite a real interest (this is just the kind of "soft" problem I feel
comfortable with) and wanting to interject more than once, I haven't
posted on "XSL Formatting Objects Considered Harmful." But I just got a
pointer to a ZDNet story, which suggests that the concerns of this
thread may soon be of more than casual interest, at least to U.S.
implementors:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2243282-1,00.html

ZDNet won't let me paste out, but the the paraphrase I received (in a
bulletin from NINCH, the National Institute for a Networked Cultural
Heritage at http://www.ninch.org ) reads:

> The Government will shortly unveil new requirements under the
> Americans With Disabilities Act for the Web sites of companies
> doing business with government agencies. Similar requirements
> will shortly affect all of us operating online.

It is hard to know what such guidelines and requirements would cover;
taken to its logical conclusion, however, the disabilities issue would
imply the _universal_ deployment (at least as far as "companies doing
business with goverment agencies" are concerned) of a set of abstract
FO's with richer semantics and cross-media descriptive capabilities than
layout-oriented <xsl:block> or <DIV> elements. It is certainly worth
asking who the government thinks should design these, and how they are
to be standardized across platforms -- not to mention how this
requirement is to be reconciled with the idea of a "semantic web." Can
we have our cake and eat it too?

Personally I don't think of Formatting Objects delivered to the client
as evil in themselves: it simply depends on what kind of functionality
you want to empower at the receiving end, and in this the deliverer of
the information will always be able to take the upper hand (except when
it comes to paying the bill). Rather than focussing on FOs as such (as
others have said), we should focus on the critical issue, the behavioral
semantics available to the client (whether hardwired in browsers,
supplemented with scripts, or merely potential), how these are to be
known, and how FOs work as an instrument to this end. This is what
providers and users of information at the high end will be negotiating
so fiercely. (And I include impecunious XML/web developers at the high
end. Don't fool yourself: in this world, being a member of the
techno-elite counts for alot.)

Onward and upward--!
Wendell Piez

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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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