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CSS XSLFO Gap Analysis
From Digital Publishing Interest Group
On the Monday DPUB call, one of the things that came up was doing a formal gap analysis for CSS vs XSL-FO.
Liam R. E. Quin started the following list. Please add or give samples.
- XSL-FO has a more powerful expression language for properties than calc() in CSS
- XSL-FO has page masters, and nothing comparable has taken off for CSS;
- XSL-FO (especially the 2.0 draft) has more powerful floats, indexes, hyphenation control, etc
- XSL-FO doesn't do the CSS cascade (for both good and ill), doesn't have the same box model (because the CSS box model wasn't finished when FO was done, but also because of inheritance in a more rigid vocabulary), and of course doesn't do CSS 3ish things. Not sure any of that matters when moving from FO to CSS.
- XSL-FO can copy & move elements e.g into page headers and footers, preserving or not preserving style, arguably more cleanly than the GCPM proposal(s) so far.
- XSL-FO has more powerful table support.