Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 18 Apr 1999 11:15:21 +0200
* John E. Simpson
| 
| As for those who've never used either PDF or FOs, I still don't
| quite understand why they'd *want* to use FOs alone. To grok XSL
| FOs, they've got to grok XML itself.

The syntax, but not the concept. And previous experience shows very
clearly that people will do pretty much anything that works,
regardless of how senseless it is. Some pretty common examples:

  - content/capability negotiation based on the user-agent HTTP field
    (this isn't MSIE or Netscape, ergo it doesn't support frames)
  - redirection using META REFRESH instead of HTTP redirects
  - HTML documents consisting solely of DIV and CLASS, formatted using
    CSS
  ...and so on and on and on. The list is long and fairly painful, so
    I'll spare you the rest.

| By the time they get that far, if they remain determined to create
| FO castles in the air, as it were, neither we here nor the W3C will
| be able to stop them.

I don't think it's a question of stopping them as much as educating
people to understand that it's a bad idea.

| I don't want to expend any energy to stop them. There won't be
| enough of them to worry about.

Let's hope not.
 
| I still think this is a straw-man argument -- it attacks the spec
| for failing to legislate against an extremely unlikely crime... 

Here I think you've misread the article.

--Lars M.


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