RE: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: RE: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: "Reynolds, Gregg" <greynolds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 17:00:00 -0500
In response to the "FO Considered Harmful" debate:

The emphasis on "semantically rich" markup seems misplaced to me.  There is
always some form of mediation.  The only way to get at the "semantics" of
data is by going through some intermediary: a query language.  The relation
between such a language and a presentation language is undefined; such a
language itself presents a particular view of the "original" data.  After
all, a tree query language can be used to query a relational table, just as
SQL can be used to present a relational image of (many) tree structures.

To see this its enough to consider the experience of the reader of a paper
book who wants more information about some topic in the book.  Such a reader
has many means of seeking such information, and many ways of asking
questions.  The original form in which the "data content" of the book is
stored is irrelevant, at least to the inquirer.  It has been transformed, in
all likelihood.  This is obviously the case with the web.  Its also the case
with report writers that query relational data bases and present the results
on a screen.  

So whether or not the data format used to convey presentational semantics to
a browser contains "semantics" is not really the central issue.  Or rather,
you have to make a lot of assumptions about the world to think it essential.
It reflects a data-centered view of the world, but in my view at least a
function-centered view is more appropriate.  

Its especially weird considering that the whole point of XSL in contrast to
CSS is to support the transformation of XML data.  If one transformation is
possible, so are many, giving us many data representations, just as a sytle
language gives us many presentational representations.  Which data
representation do you want to query today?  Which query language do you want
to use today?   It seems entirely likely to me that we will see lots of XML
data structures whose design is driven by data modeling considerations, and
that stylesheet designers will transform such structures into other XML
structures whose design is driven by presentational semantics, regardless of
the style language used.  Tracability from presentational abstraction (e.g.,
this bolded heading rectangle) to original data structure through n
transformations should be treated as a distinct topic.

To put it another way: Hakon's paper addresses valid and important general
issues, but unfortunately it reflects the XSL/CSS holy wars rather than a
cool analysis of the underlying issues.  

Finally, here's an alternative model:

	lambda x.(presentational-design-notation-expression x) xml-data 
			==> pixels (=presentational form)

How the xml-data gets to be that way is irrelevant from the perspective of
the presentation designer.  No reason it even needs to be xml, only
structured.  If the transformed representation retains the semantics of the
"original" data representation, great, the job of the query software is
easier.  If it has gone through 37 transformations, so be it, but then if
you want to query back to the Urdata?  Not my job.  Let the query language
designers provide for traceability, and the xml transformation programmers
retain semantics if they wish; the style/formatting/composition language
designer can only only provide for traceability back one step to the
xml-data.  From there on, its somebody else's problem.  But thats the way it
should be - divide and conquer.

The real problem with formatting objects (and similar abstractions) is not
that they hide semantics, but that they reflect a data-centric design
philosophy (style attached to tree nodes!?!?) and they model the wrong thing
(one implementational view of the formatting process).  Its not so much that
they're harmful but that they're completely unnecessary.  The alternative is
a reader-centered design philosophy used to model the things readers use:
documents, not the process of formatting documents, and certainly not one
implementation of a formatting process.  Tracability from
presentational-forms back to the xml-data is implementation-defined - you
want more of it, you pays.

All in all FOs are better than nothing for now.   It'll probably at least
another 10 years of experimentation anyway before the world begins to settle
on solutions to these issues.

Cheers,

gregg's personal opinion service
(Gregg Reynolds, Datalogics)


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