Regarding your comment on xsl-editors

Thank you for your comment to xsl-editors@w3.org archived at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xsl-editors/2002JanMar/0130

The XSL WG is going through the comments at this time, developing
errata and lists of items to consider for a future version of XSL.

The following is our disposition of your above comment:

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Disposition: Explanation of why no change will be made

The issue of the design of the inheritance model has been extensively discussed by the WG. This is the reply to a quite similar comment at the CR
stage: 

The design approach taken for XSL was to have a simple inheritance model. Making this change would obviously introduce an exception to this
model. There are many other properties that one MIGHT not want to inherit from e.g. a table-and-caption to the content of the cells so why single
out indent? If one, for example, wants to center a table-and-caption one specifies text-align="center" for the table-and-caption, which inherits to the
cells.

There are also cases where it is necessary to be able to use the value of an indent value in effect outside a reference area inside it. One example is for
"CSS side floats" where the floated object is to have the same indent as where the float was defined. In XSL this means that the indent of the content
of the reference area generated by the fo:float should be the same as the indent of the fo in which the float occurred. In other cases, eg when using an
"offset" style where paragraphs are indented, but "headings" are not, it is also more convenient to inherit the indents. 

The consensus of the working group was to not introduce this breaking of the inheritance as it is sometimes very useful and in the cases where it is
not what the stylesheet author wishes it is very easy to make an explicit specification of the desired indent. An example, using attribute-sets, has been
added to the specification to show this. 

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Please Reply (cc-ing xsl-editors@w3.org) if you wish to make
an objection to our resolution.

Thank you for your interest in XSL.

Paul Grosso for the XSL FO Subgroup of the XSL WG

Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2002 12:13:05 UTC