Re: a novice's question

["anilia bruho" <musoryanin at hotmail dot com>]

Thanks to everyone for your comments.

>This has come up before and I entirely sympathize. I have often
>expressed the same reservations about the whole DSSSL/XSLFO model.

If anything, I would like to cast my ballot to vote for a complete set of 
programming features to be implemented in the XSL-FO standard. Do you think 
this is possible in principle, perhaps in a next version?

>*do* have the multi-switch/multi-case stuff in XSL FO (6.9.3 ff),

This would not solve my problem - those features allow to choose among 
sub-trees, but still there are no ways to query any element about its 
parameters (fonts, dimensions, colors) and to base the choice on that 
information.

Still, the presense of _choice_ of any sort in the current FO standard is an 
indication that, in principle, programming elements are not totally alien to 
this language and, if introduced, would not "break" its ideology in any way.

Consider this: Nowadays many XML documents go down a three-step ladder, from 
XML via XSLT to FO, and from FO (most often) via some FO processor to PDF. 
Now, the first (XSLT) and the last (PDF) steps both have complete 
programming capabilities (PDF is effectively Postscript which allows for all 
sorts of math, loops, etc.). Why, then, the middle step - FO - is deprived 
of this completely? I see no real reason for this.

I think it is perhaps reasonable to require that a very low-level language 
be absolutely static and declarative without any algorithmic stuff. But 
certainly XSL FO is not _that_ low-level for this to apply. You _can_ and 
_do_ go down from XSL FO to a still lower-level representation, and for this 
transition to be efficient, XSL FO must be fully programmable.

>I think the jury is out. We need more experience in doing real-world
>design using FO.

I, for one, would be glad to try re-building some of my TeX macros in XSL to 
use in some very real-world projects, but the static nature of XSL FO makes 
me doubt if this is possible at this stage.


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