Re: [docbook-apps] Future of XSL-FO

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

On 9.5.2012 19:51, John W. Shipman wrote:

> 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.

Well, this is more or less very close reality of W3C working group
responsible for XSL-FO. But this is mainly because XSL-FO 1.1 is good
enough to solve majority of batch formatting problems, there are dozen
implementations of XSL-FO 1.0/1.1 and they don't face high presure from
customers for adding new features.

So while there is a list of requirements for new exiciting and powerfull
XSL-FO 2.0 features, interest between users and implementers is not high
enough. If you care, please let this known to W3C and to vendor of your
XSL-FO engine.

http://www.w3.org/community/ppl/

> 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.

Committee is not virtual, there are real people inside. If you think
that more should and could be done, please join WG and push work forward.

> 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?

Definitively no. CSS Print features are still far beyond what XSL-FO can
done today.

> 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?

In general, when using CSS almost everything like ToC must be
precomputed. There are CSS Modules that can do proper cross-referencing
with page numbers etc. Such things are supported by standalone CSS
rendering engines like PrinceXML or Antenna House CSS Formatter.

> 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? 

white-space: pre-wrap;

> If they do, will I be able to tell the
> hard line breaks from cases where the line got wrapped?

In theory this could be added to CSS, but I don't think it is supported now.

				Jirka

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