Future of XSL-FO

["John W. Shipman" <john@nmt.edu>]

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