Re: XSL-FO Does it have the guts?

>I buy into the *concept* that XSL will be able to publish to more than
>one media with the same source and formatting language, and I think
>Leventhal misses the point that XML is all about looking beyond the
>web.  Does the set of flow objects currently in the XSL spec have enough
>power for publishing?  On the continuum from 'easy' to 'hard' publishing
>jobs, what will XSL be able to address?
>

I've just finished working through the XSL spec in great detail, and I feel
pretty confident that I could write style sheets to handle any or all of my
own books using the current draft.  Needless to say the software that could
turn my XSL into actual printed pages isn't there yet, but the language
looks powerful enough for most uses.  The only things I see that the
Quark-heads would likely miss are:

1. Non-rectangular areas
2. Arbitrary rotation of areas

Is there anything else one can imagine doing in Quark that isn't plausible
in XSL?


+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|               Java I/O (O'Reilly & Associates, 1999)               |
|            http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/books/javaio/            |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1565924851/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/     |
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