Re: Revise group description?

Well, CSS is going to be the route for EPUB fixed layout pagination. We know this much.

As for CSS for print – the jury’s still out on this one. More and more publishers are starting to look at CSS though. Media queries would help them reuse and modularize code. Oh… And preprocessors could help organize stuff, too.

The PDF library thing… yeah. There are people out there who do that. One of the things they do with PDF libraries is convert PDFs to HTML5 for display in web browsers. But there are still people out there who are building PDFs with things like iText.

Declarative stylesheet languages are comfortable for typesetting people. More so than functional languages. We like to look at stuff and label it, rather than run it through a function and get a result (which then labels it). This is one of the reasons markup languages make sense to anyone who works with type. Unfortunately, it’s my experience that declarative and procedural stylesheets are not as immediately interpretable (it’s a word. I just wrote it, so it’s a word) by people who approach things from an object oriented or functional programming background. I know of one person who said she could always teach programming to a person who got their start as a typesetter, but had less success teaching typography to programmers.

That said, the fact of the matter is that both functional and declarative/procedural languages exist. As a community, we should think utopian – get as many people discussing page layout stuff as possible, regardless of their language preference. Some stuff that makes up the craft of page layout remains the same regardless of programming language preference.

And there’s my additional $1.23 for the day. :)

From: Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca<mailto:asandstrom2@eastlink.ca>>
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 2:12 PM
To: "public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>" <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: Revise group description?
Resent-From: <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 2:12 PM

Jean, I tend to agree. The last time I saw an XSL-FO aficionado in Nova Scotia is when I had coffee with Tony this summer. I somehow suspect that there are hundreds of CSS experts in this province, on the other hand. And there are dozens of coders here who address their printing requirements with PDF libraries...directly driven from Java and such like rather than using declarative mechanisms like XSLT and XSL-FO. There are in fact very few programmers in my region who extensively use XSLT even...the people who do mostly use it in B2B and SOA. Little XSLT uptake, little XSL-FO uptake.

For what it's worth, I'm not convinced that either CSS or XSL-FO, both declarative mechanisms, are what most folks are comfortable with.

Arved

On 12/17/2013 02:19 PM, Jean Kaplansky wrote:
I know that most of the activity in this group has been around XSL-FO, but I think we might get more interest if we just say:

“For people interested in page layout technologies…” rather than explicitly saying XSL-FO.

I have a hunch that this may be chasing any but the most hardcore XSL-FO enthusiasts away. We already know that there are a lot of people experimenting with CSS for print, for example. Also while most people think of eBooks as being reflowable, there’s a huge demand for fixed layout pages in eBooks in trade and educational titles. We should try to get some of these people interested in the group.

Just my $.02.

-Jean K.

From: Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com<mailto:dave.pawson@gmail.com>>
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 1:14 PM
To: Tony Graham <tgraham@mentea.net<mailto:tgraham@mentea.net>>
Cc: xsl-fo Community Group <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: Revise group description?
Resent-From: <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 1:14 PM

"For people interested in XSL-FO and related page layout technologies, the
Print & Page Layout Community Group is the "virtual water cooler" where
they can hang out and discuss aspects of the current draft, of test cases,
of implementations, or of requirements in advance of their solution in any
draft. The success of the XSL-FO meetup at XML Prague 2012 shows there's a
strong undercurrent of interest in XSL-FO and its implementation, and the
Print and Page Layout Community Group is intended as a place where we can
start to build a larger community of XSL-FO users and help to raise the
visibility of this important technology."

An alternative:
the Print & Page Layout Community Group is  here to discuss XSL-FO,
requirements or other aspects of XML in print.

The success of the XSL-FO as a technology shows there's a
strong interest in development and  implementation. The
Print and Page Layout Community Group is intended as a place to
build a  community of XSL-FO users and  raise the
visibility of this  technology


HTH

On 17 December 2013 12:39, Tony Graham <tgraham@mentea.net<mailto:tgraham@mentea.net>> wrote:
The description at the top of http://www.w3.org/community/ppl/ is looking
a bit dated:

----
For people interested in XSL-FO and related page layout technologies, the
Print & Page Layout Community Group is the "virtual water cooler" where
they can hang out and discuss aspects of the current draft, of test cases,
of implementations, or of requirements in advance of their solution in any
draft. The success of the XSL-FO meetup at XML Prague 2012 shows there's a
strong undercurrent of interest in XSL-FO and its implementation, and the
Print and Page Layout Community Group is intended as a place where we can
start to build a larger community of XSL-FO users and help to raise the
visibility of this important technology.
----

Whether or not you think XSL-FO is looking a bit dated, the references to
'current draft' and 'XML Prague 2012' definitely are.

What should go in a revised description?

Regards,


Tony.





--
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
Docbook FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk