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[xsl] Re: What is the future of XSL-FO

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Newsgroups: gmane.text.xml.xsl.general.mulberrytech
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 8:32 AM
Subject: Re: What is the future of XSL-FO


> That message is undated, though the copyright goes back to 2001 and
perhaps
> was only updated to reference 4.0.  Consider that the company where you
> found the post has not made any announcements regarding products
supporting
> XSL-FO.

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The company did not implemented such a product.
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> Consider that any company not in a particular space may want to prejudice
> opinions to support a decision not to be in that space.

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I think so.
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> Consider that XSL-FO is the web standard for paginating documents and the
> comment you read about overlap with CSS/HTML is for a little-used
> "media-usage=" feature of XSL-FO (so little that I am unaware of *any*
> implementations of it!) that can allow it to be used without
> pagination.  By far the prevalent use of XSL-FO (to my knowledge 100%) is
> for the elaborate pagination of information, not at all well addressed by
> HTML and CSS.

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This is great for replace old headache-like reporting tools such as Crystal
Reports.
That is my goal with XSL-FO.
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> Consider http://www.xmlsoftware.com/xslfo.html for a growing list of
XSL-FO
> supported tools being used world-wide in the production of
> professional-quality paginated outputs.

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They are very exciting tools, but they do not suit for me in the context I'm
working. I'm just waiting for some good open source library for .NET
platform to come out. The existing ones did not work in my tests.
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> The message you cite must be dated before October 2001 because that was
the
> time that XSL-FO 1.0 did become a "standard fully accepted by the W3C" ...
> that is when it became a Recommendation and it is maturing through the
> start of the XSL-FO 1.1 project.  The message clearly was not expecting it
> or is trying to mislead the reader into believing that it has not been
> finalized when it has, indeed, been finalized.

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That's right, now it makes part of XSL standard.
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> This is *not* vapourware and my XSL-FO students are using it on a
> day-by-day basis: mass mailings, utility bills, reports, database dumps,
etc.

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Vapourware is what I feared. Every time spent in research and implement
a new technology means money flowing out. I needed some guarantee of
how much XSL-FO is forth-growing.
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> XSL-FO is for real ... many people are embracing it ... it isn't going to
> go away regardless of what large companies may have said three years ago.

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This makes me happy. Now I can get rid of commercial reporting tools and
use some open source implementation (if I find one).
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> XSL-FO's future is very bright!

> I hope this helps.

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Thank you for the attention.
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> .......................... Ken

At 2004-02-27 07:56 -0300, Célio Cidral Junior wrote:
>Below is an excerpt of an explanation for XSLT, took out from
>http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/htm
/xslt_starter_54dw.asp:
>
>"XSL is now generally referred to as XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), to
>distinguish it from XSLT. The future of XSL-FO as a standard is uncertain,
>because much of its functionality overlaps with that provided by cascading
>style sheets (CSS) and the HTML tag set. If cross-vendor compatibility is
>important, you might want to avoid XSL-FO until it becomes a standard fully
>accepted by the Worldwide Web Consortium."
>
>Can I consider valid the declaration above? I really want to use XLS-FO as
>standard in the company I work for, as base document format for report
>generation, but this declaration could make me hesitate to. I would
>appreciate any thoughts.
>
>Thank you.
>
>--
>Celio Cidral Junior
>ccidral@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



--
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G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/
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