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

Also sprach Roy T. Fielding:

 > > 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.

I agree about the need for a visual format. PDF is reasonsbly hard to
fiddle with and preserves line breaks. It therefore works quite well
for legal documents.

XSL-FO, however, does not have these charateristics. It's trivial to
change text in an XSL-FO "document" and line breaks are not preserved.
The only guarantee XSL-FO gives you is that the semantics is removed. 

 > 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.

Agreed. With its current wording, however, it encourages the use of
XSL-FO on the web. I don't think this was the intent of the TAG, and I
therefore propose you revise the document.

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          cto °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Friday, 16 August 2002 02:22:37 UTC