It is my belief that the statements made here are either false, or
reflect temporary and known shortcomings in the XSL WD.
In particular, I believe that XSL does define a FO language, it is
possible (though not required) to serialise out the FO tree as an FO XML
document instance and that XSL either does or will define the term
formatter (as the application, or part of the application, that accepts
at least one of a FO tree or an FO document instance and attempts to
produce the requested formatted output).
But I forward this comment in case I am mistaken
--
Chris
Forwarded message 1
Chris Lilley wrote:
>
> FO isn't a "language" unless you also consider HTML, DocBook, etc to to
> be langauges.
FO isn't a language because it is not defined that way. HTML and DocBook
are languages because they are defined in that way (i.e. in terms of
characters in a sequence).
> Its an XSML namespace, though. It should be possible to
> write a DTD or other schema for it. I don't se it being "implicit" in
> the XSL spec, it seems quite explicit to me.
The formatting object *language* is implicit. It is defined in terms of a
tree, not in terms of a set of legal character sequences. There is no
provision for an XSL processor of any sort to take a stream of <fo:foo>
elements as an XML stream and display them without first applying a
stylesheet (at least the identity stylesheet).
> That software is called a formatter. If the software that generates the
> FOs is also the software that consumes them, then it makes no sense to
> write out the FOs to a file. If the formatter is on a different computer
> than the software that generated the FOs - for exampl, if the formatter
> is in a printer - then it does make sense to serialise it out.
The XSL specification does not define a software component called a
formatter. There is a single monolithic beast called an "XSL Processor."
That's what I am complaining about.
Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco
"Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did,
but she did it backwards and in high heels."
--Faith Whittlesey
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