RE: Rendering of UBL Instances

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

Good evening, David,

At 2003-05-07 09:54 -0700, Burdett, David wrote:
>Thanks for the feedback. However using processing instructions causes
>problems as, for example, PI's are banned from SOAP [1]. Since I can
>envisage that putting a UBL document inside SOAP enevelope will be one of
>the main ways in which UBL documents will be transported I think this is a
>significant restriction which should be avoided.
>
>Thoughts?

Introducing any new non-standardized stylesheet mechanism would require 
customized machinery to access the stylesheet information for the rendering 
of a document.  I understand from asking others at the XML Europe 2003 
Conference that SOAP attachments are opaque to the protocol and that 
processing instructions would be preserved when included in such an 
attachment.  I am unfamiliar with the SOAP development community's 
justification for banning processing instructions.

Regardless of this, however, as stated in our supporting comments posted 
earlier, the specification of a stylesheet provides no assurances to the 
sender that the recipient can utilize the indicated technologies to produce 
an acceptable presentation.  Limitations of available software and 
platform-specific capacities may prevent the recipient from being able to 
render the document as desired by the sender.

In our discussions in our committee and in the joint UBL meeting in London 
it was felt that while stylesheet technologies may be very appropriate for 
the sender of a message to produce a final form presentation, it is not 
appropriate to add machinery to UBL for the specification of any particular 
presentation technology to be specified for use by the recipient.  Should 
the sender wish to present a final-form format to a recipient, that is out 
of scope of UBL and the sender could use the Portable Document Format (PDF) 
as an adjunct to the UBL data.

These arguments were presented to and accepted by the LCSC at the London 
plenary, who are responsible for the elements and attributes of the UBL 
vocabularies.

Further consideration of this issue has brought to mind the scope of the 
subcommittee's work to produce formatting specifications that are 
technology agnostic.  Our objective is to specify where information found 
in UBL documents is to be presented in the printed form, without knowledge 
or reliance on any particular presentation technology.  It could be 
stylesheets, it could be vendor-specific formatting applications, or it 
could be any technology at all.  Perhaps adding W3C stylesheet-specific 
information to the instance might prejudice against vendor-specific 
implementations of our committee's formatting specifications.

Note that even XSLT and XSL-FO implementations of the formatting 
specifications are out of scope for the FPSC committee and will be 
contributed to the community by some of the members of the committee or 
outsiders who work with the committee deliverables.  The fact that they 
happen to be used to produce the example renderings is irrelevant to the 
mappings.  It was also decided in London that the next UBL package will not 
include stylesheets and will only include result sample renderings.

I hope you have found this discussion helpful.  Thank you again for your 
input to the subcommittee.

......................... Ken

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G. Ken Holman                mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
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