Subject: Re: Nostradamus (was Re: FO. lists as tables) From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 15:45:40 +0100 (BST) |
> Take TeX's line-breaking algorithm, for example. You can specify what > it does in terms of its results: It breaks lines on a per-paragraph > basis in such a way as to minimise the total number of "demerits" in > that paragraph, where "demerits" has a precise mathematical definition > (which I won't go into here). I think that one of the main points about the dsssl/xsl-fo kind of abstraction is that it allows a formatter neutral specification of style. If you were to enforce things down to the level of line breaking then essentially you would only ever have one formatter available. (You could build another one, but why bother if it was forced to give the same results.) For example TeX isn't a bad formatter, but it isn't perfect, but if the algorithm specified for XSL-FO wasn't _exactly_ TeX's (for instance, if it had improvements like being able to limit runs of consecutive hyphens, or to hyphenate the first word of a paragraph, or to be able to dynamically change the shape of a paragraph depending on insertions or page breaks or...) then it would be impossible to use TeX as a back end for XSL. You can write a style specification in dsssl today and run your document through jade and then the document comes out with that style applied in a somewhat related manner in MSWord, in TeX, or in Frame. This is a useful feature. I don't see how you could possibly specify that these three different systems make the same line and page break choices, so it seems the only way to ever get a standard that specifies things down to that level would be to not use any existing formatters and only allow (new, and a possibly unique) formatter that was written to the spec. Of course if you are writing a book, you want to make sure that you, and your final typesetter are using the same xsl formatter so you get the same results, but then the fact that other people, or you later, can use the same style specification and format the work in a different system or for a different media seems like an advantage rather than a disadvantage of XSL. David XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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