XSL-FO meets the Tower of Babel
Jun 6, 2012 5131 views 
XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) from the W3C is an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics. While it shares many properties with CSS, it is most frequently used with paged media, such as formatting XML documents as PDF. XSL-FO 2.0 is currently under development, and one of its top-level requirements is for further improved non-Western language support. However, the requirement for improved support in XSL-FO 2.0 is actually less specific than the 1998 requirements for XSL 1.0 since we recognised that we didn't have the knowledge and expertise to match our ambitions. For that, we would need more help -- either from individual experts or from the W3C forming more task forces along the lines of the Japanese Layout Task Force to capture and distill expertise for use by all of the W3C and beyond.