Re: Does the Crystal Goblet apply?

On Thu, January 2, 2014 3:45 pm, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
> On a sidenote, Tony, I am personally a fan of SWIG:
> http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.macperl/2003/09/msg2874.html. :-)

I first heard of SWIG from you back in your Perlish FOP days.

> Dunno if SWIG is the answer, though, although it's something to
> consider. At the same time I was associated with FOP I wrote an XSL-FO
> formatter in Perl that captured quite a lot of the spec: that took less
> than a calendar month. I obviously had the significant advantage of
> knowing the spec very well, but I'd still say, based on that - and
> general experience - that writing XSL-FO formatters from scratch for a
> few more important languages could well be better than SWIG.

So where did I go wrong with xmlroff?

More to the point, who is going to write these multiple formatters?  Going
to get them from 'quite a lot' to 'everything people expect to use'? 
Maintain them going forward?

> I think you hit on a central point, which is education: tutorials, for
> example. XSL-FO is not suffering low rates of adoption because it's more
> difficult to use than other technologies, it's suffering because it
> hasn't been sold that well.

And if it's not officially part of the OWP and if the W3C is concerned
about pushing the CSS 'brand', it won't be sold at all by the W3C.

Writing tutorials and 'interface' libraries doesn't have the cachet of
writing a new spec, but it may be more practical at this point.  However,
I don't know how well it fits with your (I think) earlier point that
developers don't grok XSLT to begin with or with Kai's point about ending
up having to tweak the FO files by hand.

Isn't this also the sort of thing you were arguing for a year or so ago or
were you just on about conformance of existing processors?  If it was,
forgive me for taking so long to wake up to your PoV.

Regards,


Tony.

Received on Saturday, 4 January 2014 12:48:15 UTC