Re: Nostradamus (was Re: FO. lists as tables)

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[politics again - skip if uninterested]

At 09:33 PM 10/14/99 +0800, James Tauber wrote:
>> Funny thing.  I always expected the XSL community's initial hostility to
>> CSS and failure to build bridges early on to be the reason why XSL FO
>> failed to take off.
>
>What makes you think it wasn't the other way around?

All I get is the public messages - in public, I'd have to say the ratio of
XSL dissing CSS to CSS dissing XSL, especially in the early days, is about
10:1. (I just walked through the public archives to confirm that. Your
mileage may vary.)

I do find it funny, and somewhat sad, that the two communities stay in
their own little worlds - XSL on xsl-list, and CSS on www-style.  The
cross-fertilization might well have been interesting.

>> The later decision to reconcile the two specs may have muddied
>> the waters for XSL, but I suspect it may have saved XSL FOs from becoming
>> yet another different spec no one wanted to implement.
>
>I am not aware of any implementers who wanted to implement XSL FOs more
>because of reconciliation with CSS!

Heck, I offered to work on a CSS->XSL FO converter for FOP, though I can't
say I've found time for it.  I have, however, heard of several other cases
where people are pondering using CSS and XSL on a more 'interchangeable'
basis now that the two vocabularies are compatible.  I've also heard from
several Web developers who were excited to hear that their existing CSS
knowledge would be of use in XSL, which significantly expands the community
of potential early adopters.

I'm not aware of any die-hard XSL folk who were excited about the CSS
reconciliation, but I think I've made my point.

>> But heck, I've already come to the conclusion that I'm 180 degrees away
>> from Sebastian "nostradamus" Rahtz's postions, and probably at least 160
>> degrees away from most of the people who find XSL FOs compelling.
>
>In my experience, many of the people who find XSL FOs compelling are
>typesetting specialists. Those typesetting specialists who have doubts about
>XSL FOs seem to have even greater doubts about CSS.

If they really want to do it 'right', without 'political' interference from
the W3C's existing body of standards, I'd politely suggest that they find a
body more tuned to the needs of typesetters.  Or work with DSSSL, which
seems _very much_ alive, despite several reports of its demise.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com


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