XSL Debate, Leventhal responds to Stephen Deach

[David Brownell]

"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> 
> However, I think a fundamental point that both you and Paul are missing
> here is that even _if_ you have to reorganize your document so that CSS can
> display it easily, the impact of that 'dumbing down' is much less dramatic
> than the impact of transformation to formatting objects or XSL.  It's a
> smaller project that creates less dramatic problems.

Your comment sounds like "the FO criticism"... I need to strike
the "or XSL" to make sense of it, since XSL(T) can often be used
to achieve the transform.  FOs could be a target; not XSL(T).

I'll certainly grant that a document turned to HTML or FOs is
going to be painful to mine for useful data, including semantic
manipulations via DOM.  But I won't grant that as a "dramatic
problem" in all cases ... like the "just display the data" case.

Also, keep in mind that there's no CSS-1 engine (except maybe
Mozilla M6) that does what it should in the "just display this"
case.  There's no way to avoid having a "dramatic problem":
things need to be written in a browser-specific manner, which
can be a major problem!!

- Dave

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