Re: XSL-FO & Images

transformations from (X)HTML to XSLFO and vice versa quite a bit.

Could you elaborate?

You can tokenize HTML style attributes in the usual way and use
the values for the CSS properties unchanged as FO property values,
and it will work well enough. Well, a more useful example would be
the reuse of the rather horrible ad-hoc font family format.

One of the professed advantages of FO over CSS is that as ituses an XSL
syntax it is easier to parse and deconstruct the rules. The use of CSS
syntax within the attribute doesn't really help in that aim it seems to
me.

Quite correct. Nevertheless, inventing something more regular than the
CSS syntax for e.g. font family lists would probably lead to other
undesirable trade-offs, so reusing CSS syntax for this and a few other
properties might not seem to be the worst possible idea. After this
decision, wholesale import of CSS syntax is obvious and rational.

As I said, while section 5 suggests there is only one grammar to use
for parsing XML attribute values into FO property values, there are
actually half a dozen or so, counting border and font shorthands.
This is one of the rather unpleasant surprises people developing XSLFO
processors encounter.