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Re: use cases for d-o-e


Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com> wrote
> On the other hand, client-side XSLT was not supposed to use HTML as its
> display language ... it just kind of happened didn't it?
...
> While understandable, this is far from
> realizing the full promise of client-side XML.
...
> We have yet to see anything like FO in the browser.

Well, for d-o-e issues it's not relevant whether a transformation
generates HTML or FO. What's relevant is that Mozilla renders
the result directly from the result tree, which was envisioned
as performance improving method by the XSL WG.
The d-o-e relevant problems are the same, whether you store
  "bla bla bla <u>important</u> bla bla"
or
  "bla bla bla <fo:inline text-decoration="underline">
    important</fo:inline> bla bla"
in a VARCHAR in your database.

Since the split of XSL into XSLT and XSLFO and the decision
that the FO and the CSS display models will converge, it
doesn't make much difference whether you use FO or HTML+CSS
as intermediate vocabulary for the purpose of displaying
XML content in a browser.
I believe it's fairly entrenched now that HTML is used for
online browsing and FO for generating paper copies via PDF
or PostScript.

> Would be nice, wouldn't
> it? But we're all so used to HTML's display semantics that we don't even
> notice anymore the way HTML lays us out on Procrustes' bed.

There is a lot of stuff you still can't do in FO. And
you still have to use tables for even slightly non-standard
layouts. I've become rather disenchanted with it. The
general lack of good books and expert advice about FO
doesn't help either.

> As for the speed of the transform, IE gets it at the price of platform
> dependency, doesn't it?
Hardly. Both MSXML and Transformiix are compiled C. There are
no significant system dependencies in XSLT processors apart from
memory management, after all, we don't blit graphics onto the
screen. MSXML may profit somewhat from tighter coupling between
the browser and the transformer component, but let's face it, they
just did a good job doing performance optimisations.

Regards
J.Pietschmann

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