W3C Print Symposium

I am the representative of Inventive Designers in the W3C XSL-FO Working Group. This week I was at the W3C Print Symposium 2006 at the Heidelberg Print Media Academy. It was a great opportunity to speak to other XSL minded people, as well as to see what other print technologies exist within the W3C.

Comparing the different W3C ‘print’ technologies and the stages these technologies are in (and have been in the last couple of years), it is clear that XSL-FO is the most advanced, and the one actually practically used for the last years, in small businesses as well as large enterprises.

The second day, we had a workshop on the future of XSL-FO 2.0, more specifically what features should be added. Almost 40 people showed up for this workshop, and they all actively contributed, a great experience. All with the same goal: make XSL-FO even better suited for various printing and formatting tasks it currently provides for both book-type documents as business-type documents, as well as to extend the range of documents to marketing-type/magazine-type documents. The latter have more layout-driven requirements, including non-rectangluar regions. A tighter integration with SVG would be one of the things that enables this.