Changes in the October 18 Working Draft of the XSL specification

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu>]

I've updated Chapter 15 of the XML Bible, XSL Formatting Objects, to 
cover the October 18 Working Draft of the XSL specification. See

http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible/updates/15.html

The changes in this draft were mostly fairly minor. In no particular order:

The fo:simple-link element was renamed fo:basic-link, probably to 
avoid confusion with XLink simple links. Along the way it picked up 
three new properties used to control the appearance and behavior of 
the targeted document:

target-presentation-context
    A URI that generally indicates some subset of the external 
destination that should actually be presented to the user. For 
instance, an XPointer could be used here to say that although an 
entire book is loaded only the seventh chapter would be shown.

target-processing-context
     A URI that serves as a base URI in the event that the external 
destination contains a relative URI. Otherwise, that would be 
considered relative to the current document. (I'm not a 100% 
confident that I've interpreted this one correctly, but this seems 
the most natural interpretation.)

target-stylesheet
     A URI that points to a style sheet that should be used when the 
targeted document is rendered. This will override any style sheet 
that the targeted document itself specifies, whether through an 
xml-stylesheet processing instruction, a LINK element in HTML, or an 
HTTP header.

border-after-precedence, border-before-precedence, 
border-start-precedence, and border-end-precedence attributes were 
added to the table properties to specify what happens when, for 
example, one cell's bottom border conflicts with the next cell's  top 
border.

Finally, a font-selection-strategy property was added to the font 
properties. This property lets you specify whether surrounding 
characters are considered when a font is chosen that best matches the 
actual characters. This is a fairly
obscure property that only really matters if you're using multiple 
scripts (e.g. English and Cyrillic) in the same document.

I may or may not have found all the significant differences between 
the two drafts. I really wish W3C working groups would at least 
publish reasonable change logs with each new draft.

-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|                  The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999)                   |
|              http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/               |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764532367/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/     |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

Re: Changes in the October 18 Working Draft of the XSL specification

[Sebastian Rahtz <se...@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
 > The changes in this draft were mostly fairly minor. In no particular order:
excellent, thanks for distributing this

Note another change that matters to me is the addition of
"scale-to-fit" as a value for content-width and content-height. This
lets you say that a graphic is to fit the page width, whatever size
that is or whatever size the graphic's natural size it.

I should point out to the XSL editors that this does not (I
now realize) entirely solve the problem, as it would be a reasonable
requirement to say that graphics should all be 90% of the page width,
centered, which we still cannot achieve. 


Sebastian