Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful From: Alex Milowski <milowski@xxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:49:55 -0700 (PDT) |
On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, [iso-8859-1] Håkon Wium Lie wrote: > James Clark wrote: > <snip> > > but it's > > no basis for the claim that XSL Formatting Objects are harmful. > > If servers output XFO instead of (X)HTML (or other globally known, > abstract formats) harm is done. > It would make absolutely no sense to do this. The formatting object are a collection of instructions to a formatter and provide no real value when they are realized as an XML document because: 1. It is not a linear interpretation of the formatted result (see flows, regions, and flow maps). 2. They are just instructions that have to be formatted into areas and placed in a region. In XSL there is a concept of a flow and flow map. Hence, it is possible to specify as siblings in an "FO document" that is placed in two different regions on a page. Given this, realizing a document as an FO document would provide little value to a client browser because the browser would still have to do the layout and placement of areas within the regions and also deal with the non-linear aspects of the flows. If a browser could do all this, then applying the tree construction portion of XSL should be trivial. IMHO, the sane way to view this is: 1. XSL on the server that produces a dead format--from XHTML with CSS to PDF ("dead" meaning less semantically rich with no ties to the original structured content). 2. XSL on the client with browsers that actually format documents--not just XML-to-XML transformations. Now, don't read this the wrong way. Browsers do some kind of formatting today with HTML and CSS. XSL just goes beyond this in the specification of format and layout. Given the above, I don't think we should worry too much about people shipping FO documents around. It really isn't practical. R. Alexander Milowski alex@xxxxxxxxxxxx Remember: Stressed spelled backwards is desserts. XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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