Re: Please resurrect xsl-fo tutorial on w3school

On 2015-10-26 22:58, Patrick Goetz wrote:
> To follow up on this:
> 
> Is there any chance or reviving the XSL-FO 2.0 committee?  I'm
> surprised that, at the very least, the RenderX/Antenna House/Altova
> people aren't interested in moving this along a bit.

The considerations that led to my recommending we (W3C) close the XSL-FO 
WOrking Group were:
(1) the work was going very slowly;
(2) it was unusual to have more than three people on a conference call.
(3) it seemed unlikely, given that we only had two or three people on a 
call,
     that we'd get much implementation. In particular we need at least 
two
     implementations in order to publish a Recommendation.

Meanwhile, although it's true that CSS lags behind for print, it doesn't 
lag behind as far as you might think. Certainly it's in use by major 
commercial publishers, and I've seen e.g. New York Times bestsellers as 
well as text books that were done with CSS.

Antenna House Formatter and PrinceXML can both put page numbers into 
cross-references, by the way. Probably so can e.g PDFReactor.

And when I go to a CSS Working Group meeting there are 20 to 40 people 
in the room. Not all of them are interested in implementing support for 
pagination, it's true (and that's a problem) but there are more people 
in the room interested in it and implementing it than there had been on 
an XFL-FO call for several years.

So the question is not, how do we compete with the Web platform, It's 
how do we make the Web platform meet our needs?

There's still a lot of work to be done.

You ask a specific question - what would it take to re-open the XSL-FO 
Working Group. I'd consider it if we had,
* several implementors
* multiple people proposing new features and bug fixes and seeing them 
get deployed
* a reasonable chance of half a dozen or more organizations joining W3C 
to help with the work
* a likelihood of 12 to 20 people *actively* involved.
* an active W3C community croup, maybe with dozens of mail messages 
every week.

I'm not trying to raise barriers - this is actually a fairly low bar, 
and very typically does get met by potential new Working Groups. Another 
way to look at it is that it'd need to get between 20 and 30 yes votes 
from the W3C Advisory Committee, and no strong objections, e.g. from 
people invested in CSS. Since XSL-FO uses CSS, a WG to update XSL-FO to 
use the latest CSS might fly, but a community group could start that 
too.

I hope this helps.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C
XML Activity Lead;
Digital publishing; HTML Accessibility

Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2015 02:31:44 UTC