Re: Revise group description?

On Tue, December 17, 2013 6:19 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>>
...
> 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

I don't think that it is viable for this CG to be only about XSL-FO.  I,
personally, would much rather that this CG was neutral ground rather than
just the last bastion of XSL-FO.  It is, of course, the last bastion of
XSL-FO just because there is no other, but if that shouldn't be our sole
purpose.

Even if we self-identify as being interested in XSL-FO, the XSL-FO vendors
don't identify general people who are interested in XSL-FO as all that
important.  For example: Ecrion (who?) made a major release of their
rendering server this month [1], but AFAICT didn't mention it on any
XSL-FO or XSLT mailing list (but then they never have); Antenna House
pushed out a maintenance release [2] this month but only told their
customers about it; and RenderX made what was described as a "major
release" (though you always say things like that in news items) in August
[3] without informing the people who self-identify as interested in
XSL-FO.

The XML Print and Page Layout Working Group didn't have its charter
renewed because there weren't enough paying W3C members active in the WG,
and I don't see that changing any time soon.  We might be able to scrape
together enough W3C members among the members of this CG to meet the paper
requirements for forming a WG again, but without bodies paid to be the
'working' part of 'Working Group', it wouldn't get anywhere, so paper
commitments wouldn't be enough.

The XSL-FO product vendors may cite the high cost of W3C membership
coupled with the cost of paying someone to do the work and paying for
travel to F2F meetings, etc., as a barrier to participating in a WG, but,
for example, RenderX remains a long-time W3C member even though it's been
a long time since they participated in XSL-FO standards development.  So,
or so it seems to me, the product vendors also aren't interested in
standards development, which really means that their users aren't
interested in the development of the standard, or not enough are
interested to be able to push the vendors into being interested.  OTOH,
vendors have growing lists of vendor extensions or, like Inventive
Designers, have XSL-FO as one part of a larger offering, so it isn't
central to the vendors' offerings that their XSL-FO offering is the
standard and only the standard.  Large customers can also get the features
they want implemented in a formatter without the hassle of going through
standardisation just by bankrolling the development.

Without a WG to pass it on to, any spec that this CG produces is, at best,
a "Community Group Report" [4] and explicitly not a standards-track
document.  However, I don't know that we have the will to be able to
produce even that.  Yes, we have the same people here who were in the XPPL
WG at the end (though Liam isn't tasked to do CG work) and we have at
least one past-member as well, but so far we haven't had anybody piping up
asking where our copy of the spec actually is, and the occasional
rumblings about XSL-FO 2.0 on the XSL-List [5] hasn't brought anyone new
here asking to be able to work on the spec.

At this point, the way forward, if there is a way forward, for XSL-FO is
probably to make smaller 'reports' that can be layered on top of XSL 1.1
and to see if they can be adopted by the open source formatters and
eventually become part of users' expectations such that all vendors are
compelled to implement them.  An example of an open source formatter that
has implemented part of XSL-FO 2.0 is XML-Print [6], and the University of
Bologna has also done work on marginalia in the past.  (I was going to
suggest that the way forward was to jump up and down and demand that we do
something with our copy of the spec, but that seems to me to be too much
for us to chew on since no-one's been asking for it previously.)

But that can happen without the CG being explicitly only about XSL-FO.  It
hasn't happened while we've said we're only about XSL-FO, so it's not the
CG description that's holding us back.

None of this is to say that XSL-FO isn't a successful technology (despite
what some would say [12]).  Ecrion, for example, shows an impressive range
of customers [7], as does RenderX [8].  This, of course, is part of our
problem: when vendors sell large volumes to large customers, the roles for
standardisation and for individual developers are reduced.

Sadly, it's not just about the technology.  It's also about branding.  The
W3C (IMO) adopted the Open Web Platform branding as a way to wrest impetus
and mindshare back from the WHATWG, and when the W3C runs a questionnaire
about CSS branding [10] because they "want to help reinforce the positive
messages about CSS" [9], you know that it's not just about the technology.
 IIRC, XSL-FO was listed among the OWP technologies when the OWP was first
announced, but scorn was poured, and XSL-FO no longer features.

Personally, I don't have any problem with, or animosity over, CSS
supplanting XSL-FO for paginated output.  As the recounting of layout
technologies that people have used [11] shows, the only constant is change
(and TeX).  I've spent more of my own time and my own money working on
XSL-FO software and standards than just about anybody, but I still don't
see it as CSS having 'won' and XSL-FO having 'lost'.

I see it as a win to be able to make pages with XSL-FO until such time as
something better comes along.  Technology, to me, is more like a game of
Frogger -- where you jump from log to log to get closer to your goal --
than it is a duel.  It's certainly not a religious issue, but rather using
-- as it says at the end of Inventive Designer job ads after listing more
acronyms than I care to count -- 'the best tool for the job' [13].

The issue that I have is the prospect of no improvements in a
standards-based way of making good-looking pages until such time as CSS
overtakes XSL-FO.  Any advance that XSL-FO can make is a 'win', just as
any advance CSS can make is a 'win', and so too is any advance that
Speedata or any other formatter can make.  And any advance that we can
make in our own and others' understandings of the technologies, to help
people make good-looking pages in any technology, and, indeed, to reduce
the level of 'us-versus-them' in layout technologies, is also a 'win'.

Regards,


Tony.
(who was supposed to be doing paying work today.)

[1] http://www.ecrion.com/products/xfrenderingserver/overview/news.aspx
[2] http://www.antennahouse.com/2013/12/formatter-v6-1-mr4-release/
[3] http://www.renderx.com/news/index.html#August_8,_2013
[4] http://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/compare/
[5]
http://www.biglist.com/lists/lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/archives/201311/msg00000.html
[6]
http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/xml-print-an-ergonomic-typesetting-system-for-complex-text-structures/#note_2
    Thanks, Vincent, for the link.
[7] http://www.ecrion.com/aboutus/customers.aspx
[8] http://www.renderx.com/customers/index.html
[9] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Dec/0374.html
[10] https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/cssbranding/
[11] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ppl/2013Dec/0032.html
[12] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Sep/0459.html
[13] https://www.inventivedesigners.com/jobs/front-end-engineer

Received on Saturday, 28 December 2013 15:08:13 UTC