Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful From: Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 09:24:25 -0500 |
Håkon Wium Lie wrote: > > A Web > of XFO documents can be compared to a Web of HTML documents with only > FONT and BR tags. Not quite: XFO has a concept of "list" and paragraphs are indicated through containers, not line breaks. I think that if you look at the element types in wide use on the Web, formatting objects are not far down the abstraction ladder from HTML. In your document, for example, most element types are not very semantic. The only element types in it without FO equivalents are EM, H?, META and LINK. It is interesting to note that HTML does not allow you to label your footnotes semantically. > Publishing semantically rich XML should be encouraged when the > semantics is globally known, e.g. MathML. Publishing arbitrary > XML should be discouraged. Are you saying that we should give up all of the bandwidth, performance and functionality benefits of shipping arbitrary XML to the client? http://HTTP.CS.Berkeley.EDU/~wilensky/CS294-5/bosak-lecture/slide017.htm I would suggest that the solution to the identified problem is for XFOs to move up the abstraction level to a little beyond HTML (i.e. HTML+footnotes+headers+footers, etc.). The right level of abstraction is pretty well documented in common word processors: they all have concepts of footnotes, headers, paragraphs, heading levels, cross-references, etc. -- Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco If you spend any time administering Windows NT, you're far too familiar with the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) which displays the cause of the crash and gives some information about the state of the system when it crashed. -- "Microsoft Developer Network Magazine" XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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