Contents

• Pretentious Introduction
• XSL Overview
• XSL-FO
• W3C
• Getting Involved
• Questions and Ending
• Further Reading

Introduction: Umberto Eco

A quote from a talk given by Umberto Eco at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

We have three types of memory. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain.

Umberto Eco

[...] The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory:

Umberto Eco

[...] millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon.

Umberto Eco

[...] We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper.

Umberto Eco

Let me disregard the fact that at a certain moment the vellum of the first codices were of an organic origin, and the fact that the first paper was made with rugs and not with wood.

Umberto Eco

Let me speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate . . .

To designate books

Vegetal Memory

Whenever we present textual information to a human, we must format the text.

1. Text can be separated from properties such as font, colour, size and position.
2. Different people can create text and specify how it is to be formatted, e.g. an author and a publisher, a journalist and a magazine editor, a programmer and a Web site or user interface designer.
3. The same text can be formatted in different ways
4. The same format (e.g. a magazine layout) can be used for more than one text.
5. We've got a gazillion years of experience in communicating with text and graphics both on paper (vegetal) and on hardware display devices like...

Presentation and Content

What is XSL?

• An International Standard for formatting XML documents, produced by the W3C
• Produced in two technical parts, XSLT and XSL-FO

Why Two parts (Vermont Farmer)

• Part 1: XSLT, transform XML documents
• Part 2: XSL-FO

XSLT

• An XML vocabulary to transform documents
• A declarative programming language
• Version 2.0 released in January 2007 with more support for strong typing, error detection, other "programming-in-the-large" features
• Original goal was to transform arbitrary XML documents into XSL-FO XML documents for formatting

XSL-FO one-slide overview

• An XML vocabulary
• A declarative language
• Model: declare (define) "page masters"; content is a sequence of flow objects that are mapped into page areas in the page masters.

Push-me Pull-you

• XSLT supports two modes of transformation: push and pull. In one, the input is pushed through the engine, and parts of it that match "templates" are processed; in the other, a template fetches (pulls) the parts it wants out of the input; you can intermix the styles.
• XSL-FO only has push mode, in which the content creates pages
• Sometimes you also want pull mode, layout oriented, in which the layout is fixed and extracts parts of the content (this may work well with XQuery!)

You can't do everything

• Formatting covers a huge range, from cave paintings and cuneiform tablets all the way to aircraft manuals, mail order catalogues and financial reports.
• The goal is to find useful things where we can help the world through interoperability

Some Examples

[examples]

• run-arounds in old book
• run-arounds in magazine
• hung punctuation in advert
• balanced columns, copyfitting
• Hung punctuation in Japanese
• 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The W3C

• We're a non-profit consortium.
• We're a secret cabal that meets behind closed doors in order to exclude people (OK, not really)
• We're a bunch of aliens from outer (or inner) space
• We're an international standards organisation, and we believe that specifications should be free (libre, unencumbered) and freely availaible.
• We believe that it's wrong to make a technical specification in the knowledge that you exclude people. The Web is for all people, regardless of language or culture or ability or special needs.

Getting Involved

• We're starting XSL FO 2.0 work.
• Organizations can (pay to) join
• If you don't work for an organization that would normally pay to join, but you are an acknowledged expert in the area, you can participate for free.
• In any case you can send comments whenever we publish drafts. The Working Group must acknowledge all comments and address them before the draft can move on to the next stage. We really do listen to the comments and try to accommodate people's needs.

Questions and Ending

• About XSL-FO and features
• About W3C
• About XML, XML Query, XSLT, XML Schema, or other things we're doing in this area
• If not here, I'm liam@w3.org

Images from www.fromoldbooks.org and used by permission; other photos are by Liam Quin.

Books

• Succinct: Robin Williams, The Non-Designer’s Design Book
• On Type: Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger, Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works
• Detailed: Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
• On user interfaces: Kevin Mullet and Darrel Sano, Designing Visual Interfaces
• On XSL-FO: Dave Pawson, XSL-FO: Making XML Look Good in Print, O'Reilly 2002
• The XSL-FO Specification at W3C