RE: a novice's question

> Here's a novice's question:
Rubbish, it's pretty deep.
> 
> From reading the XSL spec I got the idea that XSLT has a 
> fairly complete set 
> of programming features (conditions, loops, etc.) but is not 
> concerned with 
> any visual formatting issues. Now, that's logical. But on the 
> other end of 
> the rope there's XSL FO which offers a good inventory of formatting 
> parameters, but has no programming abilities at all. This 
> seems much less logical to me.

I think you're absolutely right that the simple two-stage approach
"transform, then format" won't always work. Typically this gets solved for
95% of cases by using a few handy features in the formatting stage, e.g. the
ability to fill in page numbers, running heads, and so on. More complex
cases can probably be handled by doing another transformation after the
formatting, but it would be interesting to explore situations where this is
necessary.

Mike Kay


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