Re: Future of XSL-FO

[Carlos Araya <carlos.araya@gmail.com>]

The people at lxml-dev will only get half the conversation but here it goes. 

XSL-FO is as complete as it needs to be, for the domain it is used in.  People who have been in the standard bodies can confirm or deny this but I believe that FO was not meant for book publishing but to be used in conjunction with XSL to produce short articles and reports.
 
In the time the standard was developed other technologies have emerged that give you better results when creating full books. Epub 3 comes to mind. It can incorporate multimedia and do other things like the ones you're mentioning: TOC, content positioning (for some readers, right now it only works on the iPad as far as I know), multimedia (audio and video) and, as far as I know, overlays.

You can also view epub content on the browser (I use a Firefox extension to view most of mine) both online and offline, iPad, Nook, Kindle and many, many others. 

The solution you propose is not mean to replace FO or Epub. If anything it's mean to give web content a better printed output rather than the ugly and awful printout from non-css browsers way back when. 

Carlos

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:51 AM, John W. Shipman <john@nmt.edu> wrote:

On Tue, 8 May 2012, Carlos Araya wrote:

+--
| Just curious as to why you think xsl-fo is a dead standard?
+--

A colleague (who does not wish to be quoted) says there's not
much action on the committee anymore.  Although it is still
officially supported, it seems moribund.

I was sort of hoping that the committee was working on adding
critical features not in the current standard that modern book
designers appreciate, e.g., constraints about positioning content
on facing pages, or text floated on both sides of a figure, or a
page model not as primitive as the five-region simple-page-master
model.  Apparently not.

I've heard a few people over the past few years insisting that
the replacement for XSL-FO (within W3C) is to use the "@media
print" feature of the CSS standard.  If I read that correctly,
that means that in order most ordinary people to get a decent
print rendering of their web page, the following must hold:

 (1) The page author has to write the CSS to define how to
     render it on a fixed page size;

 (2) Their browser supports the "@media print" rule and
     renders it correctly.

Then the user prints it using the browser's print function.

Am I right?  Is this practical?  Do browsers do the right thing?
Will this eventually obviate the need for XSL-FO?  What replaces
the Modular Style Sheets in my DocBook toolchain?

What about the important differences between Web and print
rendering?  Will there be a table of contents?  Will that and
cross-references display page numbers instead of useless,
unclickable underlining?  How does that work in CSS?

One of my pet peeves is Web pages that can't be printed because
they contain program source code with lines way too wide to fit
on the page.  Will CSS render such pages with the pages wrapped
and not truncated?  If they do, will I be able to tell the
hard line breaks from cases where the line got wrapped?

Best regards,
John Shipman (john@nmt.edu), Applications Specialist
New Mexico Tech Computer Center, Speare 146, Socorro, NM 87801
(575) 835-5735, http://www.nmt.edu/~john
 ``Let's go outside and commiserate with nature.''  --Dave Farber