Sean,
At 05:03 PM 7/24/2003, you wrote:
...it seems rather obvious that there should be XSLs out there that
facilitate the transformation of XHTML strict to XSL-FO to PDF. (I'm not
the only one who wants to publish to web and pdf.) But when I search
around I'm not seeing many. Where are all the XSLs for XHTML?
It's an excellent question. We may well see the technology you imagine. In
time. Sort of.
But I'm afraid the layer of complexity here is XHTML itself. You may recall
how HTML wasn't exactly designed by anyone: rather, it kind of "grew" as
different vendors threw in different new tags for different features,
sometimes in an apparent effort to outdo one another. Accordingly, even
rationalized as XHTML -- even as XHTML-strict -- it's not a tag set that
reflects much of any philosophy (set of specific requirements, for
presentation or otherwise) beyond "wouldn't it be nice to do this on a web
page".
Accordingly, the mapping from XHTML to PDF or any print output format is
not trivial. You could do something, but generally you'd get pretty lame
print out of it. Like the stuff you get when you import HTML into a word
processor. If the HTML is really clean (and "well-formed" is only part of
the story here), you can do a tolerable job getting most of the way to
print. If it's not ... well, webheads wonder why XMLers are so "religious"
(read: stuck up) about validation and clean design. This is why. Show us
slack, messy design -- or markup escaped into text! -- and all we see is
visions of complex, nasty code that someone will have to write to handle
all the exceptions, and error messages to go with it.
There may well be partial solutions, however; and in principle, especially
if your body of HTML docs reflects a strong tagging discipline, it should
be possible to get decent results with some moderate effort.
In fact, hopefully someone will come along with this stylesheet. I'm sure
it's been looked at. The FO formatter vendors probably have an idea of
where to go -- they're certain to have heard the question before. On the
other hand, even with the stylesheet, your mileage will vary.
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez
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Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
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