Re: Using an XSL Formatter as an XSL-FO Web Browser

At 03:23 PM 2/11/01, Nikolai Grigoriev wrote:

>Speaking in general, I don't like anathematizing XSL-FO as the worst enemy of
>the Semantic Web just because they can express fine-tuned layout in a
>self-contained document. Following this logic, CSS2 is equally harmful because
>it lets you style a document consisting entirely of  <div>s and <span>s :-).
>(I feel I am repeating things abundantly said in 1999, so I stop :-)).


WAI are addressing this in general terms for XML accessibility guidelines.
SVG, XSL-FO, SSML are all in this class of document, presently called
(rightly or wrongly) final form vocabularies.

In terms of accessibility the fo/svg/ssml is less accessible, has
less semantic content, than the source xml. Hence our desire to 
have them be seen as short-lived, i.e. 'on the way to' medium A, B or C.
Finding a good definition of this class of vocabularies is proving hard,
also the right words to deprecate its use as other than short lived.

I'm unsure if CSS has more support in W3C than fo's, or whether its just
a case of CSS shouts louder? In terms of implementation, I don't know of
any CSS3 implementations, do you? By those terms fo's are winning, if its
to be seen as a conflict. Industry and the open source people don't seem
too interested in CSS3. I don't remember James Tauber asking if CSS should
be the target of his work? 

Just my opinion.

DaveP

Received on Sunday, 11 February 2001 12:20:46 UTC