Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx wrote on 04/02/99 08h36:

>I don't think such a change in charter could be implimented without
>seriously pushing back the delivery of the final Rec.... how popular might
>a move such as this be?

Au contraire! separating the two components would probably mean the 
selection part of XSL would be completed much faster as it would not have 
to wait for the FO to be defined and put to task. As the selection part 
is being used and tested everyday by member of this group among others, 
it's getting fast near completion IMHO.

One *big* gain of separating the two components of XSL is to make it 
possible for other formatting languages such as CSS to evolve into 
formatting objects for XSL selection model, CSS authors have already 
proposed that. 

I personnaly find utopious to think one formatting language will solve 
all layout problems: it just won't happen for historical (no support for 
older browsers), syntaxical (FO would be so complicated and not 
comprehensible for most designers, the real end users of FOs) and 
practical reasons (we will face *a lot* of resistance in forcing yet 
another styling language in order to use XSL selection language).

The "just ignore the FO portion of the spec" attitude is short-term 
minded and will cause a lot of problems, similar to those we have today 
with HTML. 

W3C: split XSL, ASAP. 


Francois Belanger
Sitepak, Bringing Internet Business into Focus
http://www.sitepak.com



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