W3C-transformation language petition

["Oren Ben-Kiki" <oren@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Maden <crism@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


>[Oren Ben-Kiki]
>> - FOs have no advantage in real world applications over CSS.
>
>That's just not true.  CSS does not currently have the capability to
>express interrelationships between formatting objects, which is
>crucial to getting beyond the current crap I see on my screen.  Yes,
>it can be extended, but I believe that by the time it had been
>sufficiently extended, you'd have effectively re-invented FOs, only
>with curly braces instead of pointy brackets.


So, fine, FOs have an advantage over CSS. Why then would they die if
disconnected from XTL/XQL?

>CSS is in its second Recommendation.  FOs are in their second Working
>Draft.  A comparison isn't worthwhile yet.  In the future, either CSS
>will be simple but not as powerful as FOs, or nearly isomorphic to FOs
>with a syntax that's confusingly different from XML.  I don't see the
>latter situation as a win.


Agreed.

>The problems that FOs are attempting to solve are hard.  The solutions
>will be complex, whatever delimiters the syntax uses.


No argument. The same holds for CSS, of course. In fact, the problems being
solved are almost exactly the same :-)

Have fun,

    Oren Ben-Kiki


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