Re: [xmlroff] XSL-FO question

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Steve Cheng <g3c...@cd...> wrote at Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:23:57 -0400:
> This is really a general question about the XSL-FO spec,
> but since Tony Graham is listed as a contributor there
> maybe I can coax him into answering here :)

I'm listed as a contributor for my work on the XSL 1.0 test suite when
the XSL spec was a Candidate Recommendation.  I am no longer on the
W3C XSL FO subgroup.

Questions like this should go to the xsl...@w3... list.

> How are property value specifications supposed to be
> parsed in XSL-FO?  One place it says that they
> can be "expressions" (e.g. "from-parent()" etc.),
> but in list of properties you often have something
> like this (for font-family):
> 
> [[ <family-name> | <generic-family> ],]* [<family-name> | <generic-family>] | inherit
> 
> which seems to be incompatible with the expression
> grammar.  Is the whole thing taken as a string,
> and therefore one is forced to write:
> 
> font-family="'Verdana, Arial, ...'"
> 
> (note the double-quoting) which seems very awkward
> and certainly not how CSS is written.
> If not, how would one use expressions in the font-family
> specification?

But the text after the box for font-family says:

<string>

   The names are syntatically expressed as strings.

I would say that since the property is taken from CSS, it should be
parsed like CSS2, but I don't speak for the XSL FO subgroup.

There is, of course, the counter-example of <uri-specification> which
in XSL requires more quoting than most people expect.

Regards,


Tony.