Re: Customer requirement, a critque

> Rather than just go in an modify them, comments on the requirements.
> http://www.w3.org/community/ppl/wiki/CustomerRequirements
> 
> 3. -1 talking about products, surely we should be talking of
> fo:blocks? Like it. Just a bigger version of 1?
>   Please fit [id range perhaps?] or the contents of a
> block-container, in n pages (please add 'starting on
>   new page' as an option)

I am not sure why you use the term "fo:blocks". As far as I know, this is not a special FO community. The Customer requirements are independent of a special technology.

Its not related to #1. There are arbitrary rules a customer can state about how to reach that goal. Implementing all these rules is impossible in a formatting engine, because these rules are highly dependent on the situation.


> 4. Is that a verb? (To catalog?)

No sorry. I meant "product catalog"

>   IMHO the formatter needs a get out clause? It is known that some
> languages (German?) are incredibly
>  verbose compared to others. Is there any language for expressing
> max-white-space? I.e. if the ws
>  gets more than x% then just do your best, or something along these
> lines? How else to provide
> the get out for the formatter, or would you want horrible big white
> space?

If a language A takes up 5 lines and another language B takes up 20 lines, then yes, in this case I want the whitespace to be 15 lines.

The goal is to make all color (images) in all product catalogs (n languages) exactly in the same space. But it should not contain unnecessary whitespace. So the "longest text" products determine the positioning of the color images. See my two pdf files I've uploaded to the wiki. 

> An alternative could be
> expressed as 'fit these items in the same number of pages' in all
> languages?

No. See the constraint above (color images on the same space)

> 5. I don't understand this. What images? Provided by whom? Would an
> easier one be to simply
> say, where a container has n-columns, to require column-balancing?,
> i.e. leave ws at the end of
> the two columns, in equal quantity?

I've uploaded another pdf for that. We don't know in advance how big the images (red boxes in my pdf) should be. IMO we need to ask the renderer how big the whitespace between the blocks will be and insert the images according to the size of the whitespace.

> 6. Is this a corner case Tony? I don't know. I can see the use where
> 'which page this block goes on'
> does not matter. IMHO your example is too specific?

It is a very specific customer requirement (which this page is about). I am not sure how to generalize that.

I have uploaded a pdf file.

Patrick

Received on Sunday, 24 February 2013 13:33:55 UTC