Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 11:22:14 +0100
Hi.

And why shouldn't I create a semantic firewall if there is a business case
for it? The semantics of a lot of companies happen to be worth an awful lot
of money, in many cases more than the data itself, and represent large
investment of capital and time on the part of information scientists....
why should you get this for free?

As for tools outputting XFOs like they output PDF.... I remember HTML 3.2
WYSIWYG tools, that had to resort to tables and font tags etc, basically
without the ability to semanticaly strip with DIV/SPAN/CSS, such as
NetObjects Fusion 2..... a semantic nightmare of HTML was produced, that
was messy in the extreme.

With DreameWeaver and Fusion 3, and the use of semantic stripping, and the
focus on presentation possible with a layer approach and CSS suddenly neat,
tidy, understandable code was possible, to the *great* excitement of the
development community. You see presentation abstraction makes for cleaner,
easier to understand, maintian, and develop code.

As a side night, my company happens to be sat on very large quanitites of
PDF files, because at the time of their creation the Web simply wasn;t up
to presenting them. It still isn't quite ready without loss of quality.

Cheers

     Guy.





xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 04/28/99 06:17:02 AM

To:   xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc:    (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID)
Subject:  Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful




I wrote:
 > > 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.
No? Not even if you wanted to create a semantic firewall?
 > 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.
Yes, XTL is trivial compared to XFO and I don't think we will see
browsers that support XFO and not XTL. On the generator side, however,
I think we will see tools outputting XFO as they output PDF today.
 > Given the above, I don't think we should worry too much about people
 > shipping FO documents around.  It really isn't practical.
Did you try my demo described in [1]? In what way isn't it practical?
[1] http://www.operasoftware.com/people/howcome/1999/foch.html#demo
-h&kon
H?kon Wium Lie             http://www.operasoftware.com/people/howcome
howcome@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                      simply a better browser


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list






 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


Current Thread