RE: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
That's a big yes from me as well. Cheers Tim -Original Message- From: Peter B. West [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, 1 May 2002 15:50 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose Patrick, If I read you right, I think the answer to that would be a resounding cry of Yes all round. You will certainly get one from me. What did you have in mind? Peter Patrick Lanphier wrote: I would agree with the last statement about a high performance commercial all Java FO-PDF. However, there is really no need. Would anybody be interested in working on FOP with payment leaving the licensing as is? This way everybody can benefit. Anybody with experience interested? The information in this e-mail together with any attachments is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any form of review, disclosure, modification, distribution and/or publication of this e-mail message is prohibited. If you have received this message in error, you are asked to inform the sender as quickly as possible and delete this message and any copies of this message from your computer and/or your computer system network.
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
On Monday 29 April 2002 13:51, you wrote: Thank you for all these good ideas. Would anyone happen to know of an industry analyst study on the advantages of XSL FO ? This is to lend some credibility to my recommendation. Well, Gates and his minions are squealing like stuck pigs. Where there's smoke there's fire. Actually, that is the crux of the matter. IMHO, Open Source is yet another manifestation of Mecalfe's Law: The utility of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes on the network. All of those Open Source developers out there have become a more efficient team than Microsoft or anyone else can ever assemble. IBM, Sun and a few others seem to have realized this. Microsoft's proprietary approach can't win in this new world, any more than steam locomotives could win against diesel-electric (the laws of thermodynamics are a bit better-known than Metcalfe's law). My other example of Metcalfe's Law in action is Sept 11th. Compare the information flows of those events with the day of the JFK Assassination and the day of the Challenger explosion. Todd Beamer and the other passengers on Flight 97 had cell phone nodes to talk to family members who had televisions which revealed the hijacker's plans. The network gave them the information to make the decision to give their lives to save people in Washington DC. Think about that. They were able to make that decision in this age of hoaxes, spam, worms and viruses.
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
On Monday 29 April 2002 13:51, someone wrote: Thank you for all these good ideas. Would anyone happen to know of an industry analyst study on the advantages of XSL FO ? This is to lend some credibility to my recommendation. At 05:18 30/04/2002, John Austin wrote: All of those Open Source developers out there have become a more efficient team than Microsoft or anyone else can ever assemble. IBM, Sun and a few others seem to have realized this. I think I agree with John's sentiment, if not his exact phrasing. I'm trying to either a) create my own XML publishing system with Cocoon, FOP, Tomcat, XIndice, etc and market it myself under my own product name - not mentioning Apache or b) try to get enough people in the UK to support Cocoon, FOP, Tomcat, XIndice, so that we can put this software into big businesses and they wont get nervous about lack of support. I don't know about an industry analysts study of XSL:FO but we ought to be able to come up with case studies for people who have successfully used FOP. Alex Openweb Analysts Ltd, London: Software For Complex Websites http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ Free Consultancy for London Companies thinking of Open Source Software.
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
Patrick Andries wrote: Alex McLintock wrote: I don't know about an industry analysts study of XSL:FO but we ought to be able to come up with case studies for people who have successfully used FOP. I think this is crucial. I found nothing of the sort. There was recently an announcement on the cocoon list that a major NASA site (KSC, i believe) is being redesigned using Cocoon 2 (includes FOP) and will going online soon. Perhaps some details regarding FOP usage there could be asked for. Apart from this, for my job I found XSLFO superior to the various proprietary reporting tools (rather expensive stuff). It's just me, though. J.Pietschmann
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
We are considering using FOP in place of JReports or any other reporting tools. More needs to be written on how to use Cocoon and FOP as a true report writer. Any help would be great. I'm currently working with Corda in hopes that they will change the SVG format to inlining so that it can be easy used with FOP. If any of you would like to talk to them about this that would be great. Patrick Lanphier The Artemis Group http://www.artemisgroup.com phone: 814-235-0444 fax: 800-582-9710 On Tue, 30 Apr 2002, J.Pietschmann wrote: Patrick Andries wrote: Alex McLintock wrote: I don't know about an industry analysts study of XSL:FO but we ought to be able to come up with case studies for people who have successfully used FOP. I think this is crucial. I found nothing of the sort. There was recently an announcement on the cocoon list that a major NASA site (KSC, i believe) is being redesigned using Cocoon 2 (includes FOP) and will going online soon. Perhaps some details regarding FOP usage there could be asked for. Apart from this, for my job I found XSLFO superior to the various proprietary reporting tools (rather expensive stuff). It's just me, though. J.Pietschmann
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
I do not know the proprietary tools. What can I say to you that will convice you? The power of standards and open-source. Standards allows interoperability. You do not need to buy the specs of any closed-source format in order to make a bridge to (let's say) PDF or RTF :-) Force of the open-source is that improvements in the software impacts all the users. Apache httpd is the most significative example (or Linux also). The third problem is that if everyone migrates to FO, the companies behind those proprietary formats will disappear. If you plan to use you datas for a long time, it is rather a difficult choice. At last, using a XML format allows it to get its content from different sources. For example, a big usage of XSL:FO is for dynamic PDF creation from various (very) different XML sources. Patrick Andries wrote: Before convincing people to use specifically, FOP I would like to convince people that FO is a superior model than traditional model of proprietary solutions (3B2, Compuset) for documents that both FOP and those traditional tools can produce. In other words, is FO a good strategic directions. Some questions a bit more precise : 1) What are the advantages of people using XSL-FO as page description language rather than the ones their could be using with proprietary tools ? 2) I understand that everything related with XML (XSLT/XSL-FO) has a modern flavour that few techies can resist, but what are the objectives reasons ? 3) Are they any advantages to FO being integrated with XSLT that the proprietary tools would not have ? Thanks Does somebody know if any of the big software publishing companies are considering XSL-FO support ? P. Andries
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
From: Patrick Andries [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose 2) I understand that everything related with XML (XSLT/XSL-FO) has a modern flavour that few techies can resist, but what are the objectives reasons ? 3) Are they any advantages to FO being integrated with XSLT that the proprietary tools would not have ? Consider that once you data is in XML you can use that same data to produce PDF, HTML VoiceML (for you automated telephone system) or SVG graphical representation of the data by just changing the stylesheet using XSLT. No need to have multiple unsynced data sources for your different output requirements _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
Hi Fop-users I do agree that XML data offer interoperability and many many high feature regarding to data tranform and sync and exchange. XSL FO is really a nice solution because it helps to build paginated presentation layers that longs for a long time. But I would like to say that FO and other XML subtongues are not here to kill proprietary tools. Only format is an issue here. This is why FO can be a real good choice. It does not tie you to a tool vendor. Yet it does not kill tools, it simply takes care of some part of the job. If a publishing tool is only a proprietary format, than FO will make it obsolete but then it would only be the proof that the tool had no real added-value. Many Publishing tools offer high level publishing option to create, manage and maintain content. FO just answer one of the issues : standard paginated description. Having a W3C Recomendation is a real superior model in this case. As for other questions : the relation between XSL and XSL FO offers a decoupled paginated description layer. XSL tells you that tranformation is different from Formatting by naming xslt and fo namespaces. They want solution providers to keep this in mind in order to offer long term stability and higher level publishing model. For instance, you can use the page number as a parameter to test if you use LaTeX (this is a great language, ver mature. I hope thousnds of TeX/LaTeX people will come to work on FO) but it is forbidden in FO. You do not programaticaly have acces to the value of the page-number of a specific page . So you will have to test something that has some meaning in your XML data with xsl. This way, you really have decoupled logic/presentation layer. One may see it as a disadvantage but it helps you to focus on each layer/logic/responsability level thus allow you to have higher level maintenance process... Ok, enough now, it is kind of difficult to sum this up... Hope that helps... Cyril At 12:59 29/04/2002 +0200, you wrote: I do not know the proprietary tools. What can I say to you that will convice you? The power of standards and open-source. Standards allows interoperability. You do not need to buy the specs of any closed-source format in order to make a bridge to (let's say) PDF or RTF :-) Force of the open-source is that improvements in the software impacts all the users. Apache httpd is the most significative example (or Linux also). The third problem is that if everyone migrates to FO, the companies behind those proprietary formats will disappear. If you plan to use you datas for a long time, it is rather a difficult choice. At last, using a XML format allows it to get its content from different sources. For example, a big usage of XSL:FO is for dynamic PDF creation from various (very) different XML sources. Patrick Andries wrote: Before convincing people to use specifically, FOP I would like to convince people that FO is a superior model than traditional model of proprietary solutions (3B2, Compuset) for documents that both FOP and those traditional tools can produce. In other words, is FO a good strategic directions. Some questions a bit more precise : 1) What are the advantages of people using XSL-FO as page description language rather than the ones their could be using with proprietary tools ? 2) I understand that everything related with XML (XSLT/XSL-FO) has a modern flavour that few techies can resist, but what are the objectives reasons ? 3) Are they any advantages to FO being integrated with XSLT that the proprietary tools would not have ? Thanks Does somebody know if any of the big software publishing companies are considering XSL-FO support ? P. Andries
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
L Rutker wrote: From: Patrick Andries [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose 2) I understand that everything related with XML (XSLT/XSL-FO) has a modern flavour that few techies can resist, but what are the objectives reasons ? 3) Are they any advantages to FO being integrated with XSLT that the proprietary tools would not have ? Consider that once you data is in XML you can use that same data to produce PDF, HTML VoiceML (for you automated telephone system) or SVG graphical representation of the data by just changing the stylesheet using XSLT. No need to have multiple unsynced data sources for your different output requirements Isn't this the virtue of XSLT rather than XSL FO ?
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
Patrick, don't be silly ;-). In my opinion XML via XSL FO to PDF is _the_ missing link between databases and printable documents. Of course it's the transformation that matters, but without actual implementation like the FO namespace you don't get far. markus -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: Patrick Andries [EMAIL PROTECTED] An: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Datum: Montag, 29. April 2002 18:05 Betreff: Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose L Rutker wrote: From: Patrick Andries [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose 2) I understand that everything related with XML (XSLT/XSL-FO) has a modern flavour that few techies can resist, but what are the objectives reasons ? 3) Are they any advantages to FO being integrated with XSLT that the proprietary tools would not have ? Consider that once you data is in XML you can use that same data to produce PDF, HTML VoiceML (for you automated telephone system) or SVG graphical representation of the data by just changing the stylesheet using XSLT. No need to have multiple unsynced data sources for your different output requirements Isn't this the virtue of XSLT rather than XSL FO ?
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
At 17:03 29/04/2002, you wrote: Consider that once you data is in XML you can use that same data to produce PDF, HTML VoiceML (for you automated telephone system) or SVG graphical representation of the data by just changing the stylesheet using XSLT. No need to have multiple unsynced data sources for your different output requirements Isn't this the virtue of XSLT rather than XSL FO ? XSL:FO *is* XSLT ! One is part of the other and not totally separate! Alex Openweb Analysts Ltd, London: Software For Complex Websites http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ Free Consultancy for London Companies thinking of Open Source Software.
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
Alex McLintock wrote: Isn't this the virtue of XSLT rather than XSL FO ? XSL:FO *is* XSLT ! One is part of the other and not totally separate! Alex Hello, Although I am not a guru of XSL*, I would dare to argue with that. In fact, XSL consists of three technologies - XSLT, XPath and XSL:FO. You can simply use XSLT with XPath and do not worry about XSL:FO at all - IMHO, this is the most popular scenario of XSL usage. Or you can just write straight XSL:FO documents and don't use XSLT. Andrius
Re: Why is FO(P) a superior model than what most proprietary tools propose
Thank you for all these good ideas. Would anyone happen to know of an industry analyst study on the advantages of XSL FO ? This is to lend some credibility to my recommendation.
