atw: Re: Vale technical writing?

  • From: James Hunt <jameshunt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:30:06 +1000

The XML guru Norman Walsh once wrote (in 
http://norman.walsh.name/2004/12/07/webarchPdf) as follows.

"[W]eb browsers suck at printing. Never mind the fact that some browsers do a 
better job than others, they all suck. And CSS is never going to fix it. Did 
you hear me? CSS is never going to fix it. There are lots of programs that can 
produce more or less nice looking pages. TeX is an historical favourite, as is 
troff. More modern tools include various desktop publishing packages. In the 
XML world, the obvious tool is XSL, the Extensible Style Language, not the 
Transformation language. ¶

"It's important to realise, however, that XSL is an incomplete answer. You see, 
XSL is a constraint language. In XSL, you can specify how large the pages are, 
how many columns they have, the sizes of fonts, and a myriad other parameters. 
What you don't specify directly are where the page breaks necessarily occur, or 
which words get hyphenated, or where exactly any of the actual marks are going 
to wind up on paper. ¶

"The XSL Formatting Objects (FO) document is input to a formatter, a 
composition tool that renders marks on paper, typically these days in the form 
of a PDF file. Producing quality printed output is devilishly hard. Of all the 
various sorts of software systems I've encountered, a formatter is hands down 
the hardest to implement well. ¶

"There are several commercial formatters out there that do an adequate job. 
There are also a few free formatters that do a someone less adequate job. I 
desperately wish the quality of the free formatters would improve, but see the 
previous paragraph." ¶

==========

The problem remains as Walsh stated it eight years ago. It is not possible to 
produce from an XML--tagged document a PDF file that follows the typographical 
conventions applied to books. Browser--printed documents are rough-and-ready at 
best.

XML is fine for web sites, where low standards of typographic presentation are 
acceptable, but we need a lot more than that for print. I know it is customary 
for XML evangelists to do a little hand--waving and claim that printed 
materials are just too old--fashioned to bother with any more, but I do not 
find such propositions convincing. Printed books have been around since 1450 or 
so, and the form has evolved greatly and will continue to evolve. There is 
still a lot of life left in print. 

XML will not take us anywhere.

The emperor has no clothes, and the empire has no tailors.


JH

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