RenderX at WWW9

[adam moore <Ad...@nottingham.ac.uk>]

Greets all,

I was at the rederX presentation at WWW9 and as it's been mentioned a few
times now, I thought I'd let you all know what I thought - just to stress:
this is all IMVHO and personal views only.

First off it seemed quite clear that this was a presentation by a
high-up/marketer/sales person, due to the number of times use of basic
tech threw a spanner - it was quite bizarre to have someone go: 'And then
you just have to type this...and press enter' and then look all flustered
and receive whispered instructions from the front row *8-)

After a general presentation about why render engines from XML are good -
(which I guess everyone here believes already) and a continuation of the
xsl:fo - spawn of satan or boon from above debate, there was the heart of
the engine bit: 
first off, for those of you who don't know, it used to be fo2pdf. 
They render xsl:fo to an internal (XML) representation and then their
engine converts that to PDF or postscript - in the commercial product this
intermediate is exposed, but not in the shareware eval. They say they
could develop other render engines to go from this rep to SVG and so on
This is all from limited notes as I was too fascinated by the actual
presentation to take many - sorry!

In questions asked how it differs from fop, the reply was - we have
linking(internal and external), tables and images (gif and jpeg - no SVG) 
 - we cover more of the xsl:fo spec than fop.

Anyway, that's a brief report, hope it provided 2 mins distraction.

Dr Adam Moore
adam.moore@nottingham.ac.uk
minbar@stayfree.co.uk
mobile: raist-bt@sms.genie.co.uk