Re: storing info in XSL-FO: new issue? [was: Draft TAG Finding:...]

Hi Håkon,

> Thus, it seems like the principle of separating presentation from
> content in web documents is well-understood and well-established.

Yes, that should be documented somewhere as a good principle, but
it is not a constraint on the architecture.

> The recent TAG finding which suggests that XSL FOs is just another XML
> vocabulary which can/should be stored/transferred on the web breaks
> with this principle since FOs don't separate content from presentation
> -- it's all mixed up and one can barely extract the text in
> machine-readable form.

Just because it is a good principle to separate content from presentation
doesn't mean the Web should consist only of separated content.  PDF is
just as applicable for this case, and more frequent in practice, than
XSL FO's.  There exist legitimate reasons, mainly legal in nature, for
why some content is inseparable from its presentation.

The TAG finding is not even remotely about transferring representations
in one format or another.  What it is about is protocol design and the
difficulty of deploying alternative mechanisms for separating presentation
from content when each new group responsible for defining those mechanisms
is allowed to choose arbitrary names for the same concepts.  It is
reasonable for the TAG to expect, or even demand, that W3C specifications
consistently use the same terms when they reference the same concepts,
regardless of the protocol, or at least have a very good reason for
their departure.

....Roy

Received on Friday, 16 August 2002 01:15:05 UTC