RE: foo ... bar Re: Q: XML+XSL transforms to a print-ready format

["Reynolds, Gregg" <greynolds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sebastian Rahtz
> [mailto:sebastian.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Monday, October 11, 1999 6:35 AM
> 
> I guess we will never know until we try it. There seem to be strong
> arguments that it can never work.A pity that the
> DSSSL effort was effectively kicked into touch, because that would
> have answered the question.
> 
>  > Notice, by the way, the stupendous number of Humongous 
> Corporate Entities
>  > that have announced (or even hinted at) support for FOs.
> 
> too much money at stake, I suppose.

Yes, a classic chicken-and-egg situation.  Nobody wants to spend the dough
implementing without a standard, but you can't very well write a standard
without implementations.
> 
>  > What is really missing in all of this is a rigorous formal (or even
>  > semi-formal) language (or meta-language) for formatting, 
> which would allow
> isnt that what the ISO effort that resulted in DSSSL supposed to have
> been?

I'm not sure if that was one of the official goals or not;  I suspect the
goal would have been expressed more informally as a desire for clarity,
unambiguosity, non-bogosity, etc.  Careful as opposed to formal language.
What I have in mind is more formal and mathematical - think of the
relational algebra behind RDBMSs.  In the case of composition and style, I
think we need something similar for tree/network structures, and a formal
language of constraint systems.  Something that would enable Real
Engineering.  Until that happens we'll always have kinda, sorta standards,
with plenty of room for implementations to interpret.  Maybe I'm hopelessly
idealistic (or harsh), but it seems amazing to me that here a good 50 years
into the age of computation it's still such a struggle to define language
semantics.

Naturally ;) I have such a language in mind, based on Z.  XML gets all the
press and the investment, but for me at least the ISO standardization of Z
(which is now in its late stages) seems just as significant.  Not from a $$
perspective, maybe, but as a landmark in the long slow road to establishing
software and language design as a true engineering discipline.  Not only
that, but the latest draft (which is on the web somewhere or other) is a
beautiful piece of work.  I've been working with it for a while trying to
capture the semantics of composition, and I think it will work rather
nicely.  I should be finished sometime, oh, in the next century.

-gregg


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