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Re: Future of XSL-FO at W3C??

• To: "David Carlisle" <davidc@n...>, <bry@i...>
• Subject: Re: Future of XSL-FO at W3C??
• From: "David Rosenborg" <darolst@p...>
• Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 11:53:55 +0200
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• References: <000001c2767e$995003f0$2001a8c0@bryans> <200210180843.JAA20498@p...>

David Carlisle wrote:

> > Future of XSL-FO at W3C, I
> > suggest XSL-FO 2 allows CSS styling.
> 
> I find this a bizarre suggestion!

I find the current solution bizzare. I think developers are used
to the pattern: XSLT for structure, CSS for decoration. The
same pattern reappears in SVG. How do you mean that formatting
for a page media is in anyway different from HTML and SVG in
this respect?

I would say that most of the decoration properties tend to be fairly
static (i.e not dependent on the particular document being formatted).
Those static properties are mostly managed by hand so I think it is very
useful to have a compact and perspicuous notation for them.

However, I agree that it is important to facilitate those situation where
you do need to programmatically compose properties. One way to do that
would be to develop a standard XML representation of CSS. This
would just be an alternative syntax just like there is an alternative
compact syntax to the XML-form of RELAX NG. So instead
of composing a style attribute value by string concatenation
you would use a css-element. Depending on the situation you
could choose freely which notation to use as in this very
hypothetical example:

<fo:style type="text/css">
foo { text-align: right; color: blue; }
</fo:style>
...
<fo:block class="foo">
  <css:style>
    <!-- Example of computed property -->
    <css:property name="margin-left"><xsl:value-of select="$level * $indent-step"/></css:property>
  </css:style>
  ...
</fo:block>

Cheers,
David

--------------------------------------------------
David Rosenborg
Pantor Engineering AB

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Future of XSL-FO at W3C??
    • From: Ian Tindale <iandeli@c...>
  • Re: Future of XSL-FO at W3C??
    • From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>

• References:
  • RE: Future of XSL-FO at W3C??
    • From: "bryan" <bry@i...>
  • Re: Future of XSL-FO at W3C??
    • From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>

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