Re: Fw: Fw: W3C-transformation language petition

[Chris Maden <crism@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Oren Ben-Kiki]
> - FOs have no advantage in real world applications over CSS.

That's just not true.  CSS does not currently have the capability to
express interrelationships between formatting objects, which is
crucial to getting beyond the current crap I see on my screen.  Yes,
it can be extended, but I believe that by the time it had been
sufficiently extended, you'd have effectively re-invented FOs, only
with curly braces instead of pointy brackets.

> Of course, one might soften the above by saying that _today_ FOs
> have no advantage over CSS, but in the long run the FO approach
> would prove to be better. I'd say that comparing future FOs to
> future CSS is risky at best. So far, I know of things CSS can do and
> FOs can't, not the other way around.

CSS is in its second Recommendation.  FOs are in their second Working
Draft.  A comparison isn't worthwhile yet.  In the future, either CSS
will be simple but not as powerful as FOs, or nearly isomorphic to FOs
with a syntax that's confusingly different from XML.  I don't see the
latter situation as a win.

The problems that FOs are attempting to solve are hard.  The solutions
will be complex, whatever delimiters the syntax uses.

-Chris
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