Re: [xsl] What is the future of XSL-FO

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

That message is undated, though the copyright goes back to 2001 and perhaps 
was only updated to reference 4.0.  Consider that the company where you 
found the post has not made any announcements regarding products supporting 
XSL-FO.

Consider that any company not in a particular space may want to prejudice 
opinions to support a decision not to be in that space.

Consider that XSL-FO is the web standard for paginating documents and the 
comment you read about overlap with CSS/HTML is for a little-used 
"media-usage=" feature of XSL-FO (so little that I am unaware of *any* 
implementations of it!) that can allow it to be used without 
pagination.  By far the prevalent use of XSL-FO (to my knowledge 100%) is 
for the elaborate pagination of information, not at all well addressed by 
HTML and CSS.

Consider http://www.xmlsoftware.com/xslfo.html for a growing list of XSL-FO 
supported tools being used world-wide in the production of 
professional-quality paginated outputs.

The message you cite must be dated before October 2001 because that was the 
time that XSL-FO 1.0 did become a "standard fully accepted by the W3C" ... 
that is when it became a Recommendation and it is maturing through the 
start of the XSL-FO 1.1 project.  The message clearly was not expecting it 
or is trying to mislead the reader into believing that it has not been 
finalized when it has, indeed, been finalized.

This is *not* vapourware and my XSL-FO students are using it on a 
day-by-day basis: mass mailings, utility bills, reports, database dumps, etc.

XSL-FO is for real ... many people are embracing it ... it isn't going to 
go away regardless of what large companies may have said three years ago.

XSL-FO's future is very bright!

I hope this helps.

.......................... Ken

At 2004-02-27 07:56 -0300, Célio Cidral Junior wrote:
> Below is an excerpt of an explanation for XSLT, took out from
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/htm/xslt_starter_54dw.asp:
>
> "XSL is now generally referred to as XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), to
> distinguish it from XSLT. The future of XSL-FO as a standard is uncertain,
> because much of its functionality overlaps with that provided by cascading
> style sheets (CSS) and the HTML tag set. If cross-vendor compatibility is
> important, you might want to avoid XSL-FO until it becomes a standard fully
> accepted by the Worldwide Web Consortium."
>
> Can I consider valid the declaration above? I really want to use XLS-FO as
> standard in the company I work for, as base document format for report
> generation, but this declaration could make me hesitate to. I would
> appreciate any thoughts.
>
> Thank you.
>
> --
> Celio Cidral Junior
> ccidral@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



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