Re: Does the Crystal Goblet apply?

On Thu, January 2, 2014 12:54 pm, Dave Pawson wrote:
> Note the phrasing Tony?
>
> On 2 January 2014 12:42, Tony Graham <tgraham@mentea.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, January 2, 2014 6:49 am, Dave Pawson wrote:
>>> Just picking up one scope point Arved
>> ...
>>> IF (big if without a list of deliverables) we produce something like
>>> XSL-FO
>>> from this group, how do you see UI design coming into this groups
>>> scope?
>>
>> The difficulty I have with saying that we will produce XSL-FO 2.0 or
>> even
>> a 1.2 is that we have no reasonable expectation that it will be
>> implemented.
>
> I did not say an xsl-fo 2.0, I said, and meant, something similar in tone?
> I.e. a 'what' type of document, rather than how.

I don't understand.  Can you elaborate?

> W3C have (rightly or wrongly) define xsl-fo as dead today. There has
> to be a take away from that?
>   With its background and (original) author, that might point to something
> simpler.

Again, I don't understand.

>> Expanding on what I just said in reply to Liam, maybe the way forward
>> for
>> XSL-FO is to produce more tutorials and helper libraries to make XSL-FO
>> easier for people to adopt?
>
> ,,, Maybe... maybe not? Are you thinking of leveraging on current
> implementations?
> Lots of syntactic sugar atop XSL-FO?

You could look at it that way.  I hadn't gone as far as thinking of a
preprocessor where you'd write an XSLT transform to transform into some
intermediate XML format that then gets transformed into 'full' XSL-FO, but
it might be something to consider.

I have said in conversation before that XSL-FO is a bit like an 'assembly
language' for formatting, so you might think in terms of making a
'higher-level language'.

All I thought I was proposing previously was a set of functions or named
templates for simplifying the page master part of things, but I wouldn't
stop anybody expanding on that idea.

>> Or to SWIG [1] xmlroff or even do Antenna House's work for them and SWIG
>> AHF just so there's a XSL-FO formatter available to programmers working
>> in
>> languages other than C or Java?
>
> Personal view... Look forward 10 years. Will there still be
> implementations
> from which to leverage? No more than a gut feeling, but I just don't think
> of that as a productive route Tony?

The easy answer is that there will be companies using it because it's
still baked into their processes, but I don't know that there will be that
many sales of new XSL-FO processors unless the tide turns somehow.

The point I made a while ago is that I'm not opposed to XSL-FO being
overtaken by something better, just not happy to sit and wait and not be
able to make better output until such time as that happens.

Regards,


Tony.

Received on Saturday, 4 January 2014 13:05:10 UTC