Dave Pawson wrote:
At 21:57 18/10/2002, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
- HyTime standard published.
Sounds like a lonely interjection Eliot.
It would be easy for me to be bitter about the fact that HyTime, and its
XML successor XLink, has failed to find much of an audience while DSSSL
and its XML successor, XSL-FO, appear to be achieving great success. But
I'm not. I'm still very proud of what we achieved with HyTime and I
think it continues to have value and I'm still hopeful that it will find
an audience and an application. By the same token, the XLink developers
should be proud of what they've developed, despite the fact that nobody
seems to get it. Am I a little bit sad that the world didn't embrace
HyTime in a big way? Sure, a little. But I would rather celebrate the
larger successes of my collegues and our community.
More important than the acceptance of any particular specification is
the fact that we, as a community, have developed a set of technologies
of unquestioned value to the world at large. I have nothing but the
greatest respect for and appreciation of the amazing work that everyone
involved with DSSSL and CSS and XSL-FO have done and am pleased that I
was, over the years, able to make a few small contributions to the work
and that I can now reap the rewards of their hard work, which was as
selfless as any standards activity has ever been.
And while I'm thinking about such things, let me also state for the
record that my original objections to SVG as an unnecessary standard
(because suitable standards for generic vector graphic representation
already existed) were completely misplaced and misguided. I simply
failed to appreciate the power of having a well-accepted XML
representation for vector graphics. The value of SVG has really come
home to me as I've started to use it in combintation with XSL-FO, where
it enables a number of powerful presentation effects that would
otherwise be difficult at best. So thank you also to the SVG team. You
were right, I was wrong.
Cheers,
Eliot
--
W. Eliot Kimber, eliot@xxxxxxxxxx
Consultant, ISOGEN International
1016 La Posada Dr., Suite 240
Austin, TX 78752 Phone: 512.656.4139
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