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

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> But if I have to do all my work on a single system in order to ensure
> consistent results, then where is the portability?

quite! but it seems to me that what you are suggesting is that there
only be a single system. Note I count `TeX' here as a single
system, even though TeX systems are _not_ all built from the same code
base. Some are built on Knuth's original pascal sources, some are
recoded in other languages, some commercial ones reportedly have inner
loops hand coded in assembler: To be called TeX the system just needs to
conform to a certain specification that means that it gives effectively
identical output for a given input.

So you are proposing that there be just one XSL-formater with perhaps
multiple implementations and interfaces, just as for TeX.

This is not unreasonable (this level of interoperability has proved
useful for TeX, after all) but I see it as just a completely different
level to the level of interoperability given by dsssl and xsl.
These languages provide a formatter neutral styling language,
not a style language for a single son-of-tex formatter.


> But if I have to do all my work on a single system in order to ensure
> consistent results, then where is the portability? I may as well use a
> proprietary document composition application. My data is still held
> hostage.

To get identical results you would need to use the same formatter, but
you still potentially gain by having the files being read and styled,
with perhaps different results by other systems.


> I used "user interface" as merely one example of the kinds of things
> that can be modified without altering the results of the formatter.
> There are many other things in the "meat" of the formatter that could
> be changed and improved without affecting the end result.

These are the sort of things that let the various commercial TeX systems
compete with each other. But for the purposes of this discussion they
may all be lumped together as one system `tex'. Surely the aim of the
game is to widen the interoperability so that files may be shared
between these systems and frame and word and fop and renderx and
friends.

> How many thousands (millions?) of man-hours do you
> think have been wasted by people doing nothing but testing and
> modifying their HTML so that it comes out right in all the different
> versions of all the different browsers?

Yes but a lot of that is people using undocumented non standard
extensions for one browser then trying to hack in code so that it
doesn't break the other browsers, or using `valid' css constructions
that when implemened by the browser make the text just vanish.
This is rather different to the situation of two fully coforming xsl
renderers which both style each text block as specified, but produce
different line and page breaks (which are not part of the
specification).

David


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