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Subject:RE: RE: Interviewing "under the hood"? From:"Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 23 Jun 2003 14:08:09 -0400
Let me take another crack at what I see as the _real_ issue with this.
Thinking in XML for the moment, I might have something called <featurelist>, say, that defines a block containing some arbitrary number of <featurename>-<featuredescription> pairs.
Okay, now I want to render that list of features in different output formats--PDF, HTML, whatever. So I have some sort of engine (I'm vague on all this stuff because I haven't actually used XML for anything yet) that applies a transformation to my document (is that what XSLT means???) and outputs it in one format or another.
But, from what I gather, this transformation is rather simplistic. It can figure out that an em dash is a glyph in PDF and an entity in HTML and space-hyphen-hyphen-space in ASCII, perhaps; but it can't figure out that the top-margin defined for the list should not be applied if the list follows a heading or a page break but it should be applied if the list follows a text paragraph. Or it cannot figure out that the figure should go after the third list item in order to fit it on a letter page but after the fifth bullet item to fit it on an A4 page. Nor can it figure out that the top-margin (or "space above" or whatever you call it) needs to be adjusted up a couple of points on page 6 and adjusted down a couple of points on page 7.
So what I am in general decrying here is that we've gained some power but traded away some subtleties to get it.
I know I'm just being curmudgeonly about this and nobody else in the world cares, but I wanted to vent. Okay?
Dick
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com>
Reply-To: John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 13:32:27 -0400
>
>This is of interest because I'm in FM and am currently reworking my book to
>break it into 6 separate books, by category (DB, DNA, Process, etc.).
>
>An override style, such as Override2pt, is going to have attributes in
>addition to a 2pt difference...it's got a Font, an indentation, a tab
>setting, etc. Yes?
>
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