Re: techpubs/techdoc engagement

On Wed, 2016-06-15 at 13:04 +0000, Cramer, Dave wrote:
> On the Monday DPUB call, one of the things that came up was doing a
> formal gap analysis for CSS vs XSL-FO.

Yes, I saw that (I took time away this week because it's taxes week!).

I'd certainly sign up to help out with that. (see below).

What else should we do? Contact people? speak at doceng?



The biggest gaps are still probably, off the top of my head,
(1) XSL-FO has a more powerful expression language for properties than
calc() in CSS
(2) XSL-FO has page masters, and nothing comparable has taken off for
CSS;
(3) XSL-FO (especially the 2.0 draft) has more powerful floats,
indexes, hyphenation control, etc
(4) XSL-FO doesn't do the CSS cascade (for both good and ill), doesn't
have the same box model (because the CSS box model wasn't finished when
FO was done, but also because of inheritance in a more rigid
vocabulary), and of course doesn't do CSS 3ish things. Not sure any of
that matters when moving from FO to CSS.
(5) XSL-FO can copy & move elements e.g into page headers and footers,
preserving or not preserving style, arguably more cleanly than the GCPM
proposal(s) so far.
(6) XSL-FO has more powerful table support.

There are lots of little things, as Michael Miller's email points out,
and it depends on the kind of publication as to what matters; a
combination of (2) and (6) is a killer for a lot of the publications
Mike mentioned, especially where there are legal requirements around
things like what appears in page headers and footers, and those
requirements include e.g. a table mentioning the numbers of the first
and last sections on the page.

Liam


-- 
Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org>
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Received on Thursday, 16 June 2016 04:36:39 UTC