Comment by int_19h
5 months ago
XSL:FO is dead for all practical purposes.
XSLT was not popular for its original intended application - which is to say, serving XML data from web servers and translating it to HTML (or XSL:FO, or ...) on the client as needed. However, it was used plenty for XML processing outside of that particular niche.
New projects these days rarely have to process complicated XML to begin with. But when you do, I'd say XSLT (or perhaps better yet, XQuery) is a very useful tool to have in your toolbox.
syntext serna was such an engineering marvel. a wysiwyg XML editor that used xslt to fo to specify your rendering. was built in the context of docbook and dita but did work for any xsd with a xslt to fo. amazing technology. ahead of its time. and then came json :-(
> XSL:FO is dead for all practical purposes.
As opposed to what for cooking "PDF via XML" files? Because I can assure you than feeding rando.odt into $(libreoffice -pdf $TMPDIR/ohgawd) is 100% not the same as $(fop -fo $TMPDIR/my.fo -pdf $TMPDIR/out.pdf)
As opposed to code in e.g. Java that uses the built-in XML APIs and some third party PDF output lib.