Re: xsl-fo first anniversary

Dave Pawson wrote:
> At 21:57 18/10/2002, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:

>> - HyTime standard published.

> Sounds like a lonely interjection Eliot. 

It would be easy for me to be bitter about the fact that HyTime, and its 
XML successor XLink, has failed to find much of an audience while DSSSL 
and its XML successor, XSL-FO, appear to be achieving great success. But 
I'm not. I'm still very proud of what we achieved with HyTime and I 
think it continues to have value and I'm still hopeful that it will find 
an audience and an application. By the same token, the XLink developers 
should be proud of what they've developed, despite the fact that nobody 
seems to get it. Am I a little bit sad that the world didn't embrace 
HyTime in a big way? Sure, a little. But I would rather celebrate the 
larger successes of my collegues and our community.

More important than the acceptance of any particular specification is 
the fact that we, as a community, have developed a set of technologies 
of unquestioned value to the world at large. I have nothing but the 
greatest respect for and appreciation of the amazing work that everyone 
involved with DSSSL and CSS and XSL-FO have done and am pleased that I 
was, over the years, able to make a few small contributions to the work 
and that I can now reap the rewards of their hard work, which was as 
selfless as any standards activity has ever been.

And while I'm thinking about such things, let me also state for the 
record that my original objections to SVG as an unnecessary standard 
(because suitable standards for generic vector graphic representation 
already existed) were completely misplaced and misguided. I simply 
failed to appreciate the power of having a well-accepted XML 
representation for vector graphics. The value of SVG has really come 
home to me as I've started to use it in combintation with XSL-FO, where 
it enables a number of powerful presentation effects that would 
otherwise be difficult at best. So thank you also to the SVG team. You 
were right, I was wrong.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber, eliot@isogen.com
Consultant, ISOGEN International

1016 La Posada Dr., Suite 240
Austin, TX  78752 Phone: 512.656.4139

Received on Saturday, 19 October 2002 10:15:27 UTC