Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: "Scott S. Lawton" <ssl@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 13:50:57 -0400
>The people who publish PDF on the Web today aren't to my mind any
>differently motivated than those who publish Excel spreadsheets on the Web.'

>So I guess my main question is still, WHY would someone want to build
>documents in an FO-only way? I still think this is a straw-man argument

Jumping in: I apologize if I misunderstand your argument, but doesn't PDF
(and,  from UNIX folks, raw postscript files) show that it isn't a
straw-man argument?  What if QuarkXPress, MS Word, Adobe
InDesign/Illustrator, Corel Draw et al output FOs -- I would guess that
it's much easier for them to output yet another visual rendition than to
remake themselves for structured authoring.  And, wouldn't that be easier
for "typical" document creators than XML+formatting?  Authoring in pure
WYSIWYG is popular because (for many types of documents) it's easier than
the alternatives.  Creating structured content suitable for multiple
forms/renditions is lots of work.  Very worthwhile in many cases, but still
lots of work.

...

I'm strongly in favor splitting "XSL" into a "pure" transformation language
plus something else.  CSS1/2/3 are much farther along than FOs, and it does
seem strange for W3C to have two formatting efforts underway.  One of the
many advantages of creating a distinct "XTL" is that the CSS vs. FO
tradeoffs could be addressed head on, without the distraction of
transformation issues.

cheers,

-- SSL, PreFab Software <http://www.prefab.com/>



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