Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful

Subject: Re: Formatting Objects considered harmful
From: "Ray" <ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 11:51:14 -0400
Am I totally crazy to believe that the real way XSL will be used on the Web
is that Web sites who wish
to do so will provide 2 or more versions of a document?

Right now, many Web sites have links like "Click here for Print copy" or
"Click here to email to
a friend", where they strip out all the presentation and graphic junk.

I believe future websites will do the following:

1) Detect if the User Agent supports XSL/FO. If the User Agent is known not
to support FO fully or
correctly, or not support XML/XSL at all, then the server will translate to
HTML+CSS as best as
possible.

2) If the User Agent supports XSL/FO natively, send back XML + XSL to be
rendered.


Sure, some sites are going to send back FO only, maybe to increase
performance (1 hit required,
instead of 2), or to prevent ad banners from being stripped by a client
style sheet.  However, I don't
see how this is any worse than the current output of
Frontpage/DreamWeaver/NetObjects Fusion.

Just what are the semantics in HTML anyway? Does anyone really use H1/H2/etc
properly? Most
people seem to use them as a quick way to bold/font size something.  Most
web pages today seem to
resemble a mass of nested tables with spacer gifs and width/height control
to perserve layout. How
can XML+XSL+FO provide less semantics than this?

Atleast with XML and XSL, if the web site *wishes* to provide semantic data
in the future, they can
easily do it. Whereas, with heavily table-ized HTML, their data may not
easily be retargetable.




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