Re: Nostradamus (was Re: FO. lists as tables)

[Robert Barta <rho@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > --------8<--------
> > Predictability
> > 
> > Page fidelity is neither a requirement nor a goal. Presented with the
> > same document and the same stylesheet, a given renderer should always
> > produce the same results. Different renderers should produce similar
> > results.
> > --------8<--------

greynolds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx said:
> ................................................................................................................................ If I had
> my druthers we would have 100% fidelity; but consider what this means.  We
> would need to be able to determine exactly what a given document+stylesheet
> ought to look like based solely on the semantics of the language,
> independent of any implementation.

We had about the same discussions in the programming language domain years
ago. One outcome from this was - at least for me - that

    (a) the language semantics should match intuition and the most
         common problems. This is where the art of language design
         comes in.

    (b) there should be an institutionalized way to modify the default
         behaviour and coerce it to a specific solution whenever the
         language had "loose, don't care" semantics.

That's what pragmas usually do.

\rho

PS: (c) There should always be more than one way to do it and it should be fun. :-)


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