Halloechen!

Chris Hoess wrote:

 > [...]
 >
 > Well, XSL:FO is (IMO) more suitable for documents destined for printed
 > rendering and complex typography than for the WWW, which is accessed by a
 > variety of user agents with very different capabilities.  This has been
 > clearly recognized by the W3C with its work on "profiles", mobile devices,
 > etc.  XSL:FO largely exists (as I understand it) because designers for
 > printed media found CSS lacking in precise typographical and layout
 > capability.  OTOH, the CSS recommendation is written to allow the
 > flexibility necessary for WWW design.

But CSS3 will include those typographic things and would make XSL:FO
obsolete. The W3C is creating competition between two of their most
complicated efforts. :-/

 >
 > [...]
 >
 >>>Some people fear that
 >>>sites would start serving XSL-FO content instead of serving XML with
 >>>an associated FO stylesheet.
 >>>
 >>I don't know why people would do that, but automatically generated
 >>ugly web files are already existing.
 >>
 >
 > It's not the ugliness, it's the semantics.  (See dbaron's URLs).  In an
 > HTML document, it's possible to determine whether some text is a heading,
 > a list, a definition, an acronym...etc. all from the markup, *regardless
 > of how the user agent actually displays it*.  With pure XSL:FO documents,
 > all you have is appearance with which to guess the author's intent.  So
 > already elements begin to overlap (<code>, <kbd>, <tt>, for instance), and
 > things get even worse if the user agent can't deal with some complex piece
 > of layout.

All granted, I see your problem, and I also see that it *is* a
problem. However, what does this mean to me (and many other people
with limited resources who want to have their documents in many
formats, including web)? I will continue with PDF. Super. No semantics
at all, and -- in contrast to XSL:FO -- no chance for the browser to
display it more eye-friendly. Ab-so-lute-ly monolithic.

I wanted to get away from it (especially because of the file size, I
admit). But I can't write (1) an XSLT to LaTeX for fine printing, (2)
XSL:FO for extra-small PDF, RTF etc. *and* (3) XSLT+CSS for the
semantic web. So the web will get PDFs.

A well typeset document has actually *lots* of semantics (many people
think that this is even an art form :-), even if you can't create a
TOC automatically. And considering all those one thousand web pages
I've seen with abused -- and thus semantic-free -- tags I am slightly
irritated that I'm not allowed to use XSL:FO, in order to support the
semantic web.

 >
 > Auf wiederhoeren,

Tschoe,
Torsten.


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