At 2002-10-14 11:44 -0500, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
> Thus it occurs to me that it might be useful to start
> a community effort to standardize what the various
> vendors are doing unilaterally, using the EXSLT
> activity as a model.
> 
> This raises two questions:
> 
> 1. Would anyone else in the user/integrator community
> be interested in contributing to such an effort?

Count me in.

> 2. Would the vendors be interested in contributing and
> implementing community-developed extensions?

Let's hope!

> This suggests to me that it is in everybody's
> interests to standardize the needed extensions in
> advance of formal refinements to the FO spec.

And point to where freely publicly available extensions are already defined 
... we have the Page Sequence Master-reference Interleave (PSMI) XSL-FO 
formatting semantic as a free resource from our web site.  This combines 
the definition of a semantic, an element type and namespace for the 
expression of the semantic, plus an XSLT stylesheet to convert an FO+PSMI 
instance into a pure FO instance.  It is used for content-based changes in 
page geometry, where FO only supports patterned changes in page geometry.

I think this is an example of a class of extension that is not implemented 
by the formatter vendor, but can be used by any user since the result is 
pure FO.

It happens I would like to keep this resource on our own web site with our 
own maintenance cycle, but it is freely available.

> And of
> course it would be supremely cool if a single
> non-trivial FO instance could be used interchangably
> with all or most of the available FO implementations.

Amen!

Until the vendors change we could also have XSLT stylesheets converting 
from the EXSLFO extensions to pure FO, as we do with our PSMI.

Thanks, Eliot, for proposing this!

................... Ken


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