EXSLFO Project Home

Introduction

The EXSLFO project is a community effort to define functional extensions to the XSL Formatting Objects specification in advance of development of new versions of the XSL FO specification by the W3C. It is intended to be an adjunct to the formal W3C specification development process. It is modeled on the existing EXSLT activity (http://exslt.org/).

The expected results of this activity are:

Clear definitions of requirements for features and functions not addressed by the current FO specification. These features may be core layout functions (e.g., revision bars) or may be related to specific delivery technologies (PDF bookmarks and metadata).
Specifications for non-proprietary extensions to the XSL-FO language that attempt to satsify these requirements
Where possible or applicable, implementations of these requirements in whatever form (pre-processors, post-processors, extensions to existing FO implementations, etc.).

This project is driven largely by a desire to have standardized those extensions that are clearly generally required but probably outside of the scope of the FO spec, such as generation of PDF bookmarks and metadata, capturing of page-to-object mappings, etc. With the ultimate goal being an industry standard for these extensions that would allow one to have a single FO instance for a variety of FO implementations that could take advantage of all the features of, for example, PDF.

All interested parties, vendors and users, are invited to participate.

Relationship To Other Standards Activities

The EXSLFO project is not intended to compete with or otherwise distract resources from the further development of the XSL Formatting Objects specification. The primary focus of this activity is to achieve concensus on the design of FO features that are outside the normal scope of the FO specification, especially those related to the support for specific delivery media or tools, with Adobe PDF being the obvious initial target. Essentially, this project exists to act as a place to gather and discuss new FO requirements before submitting those requirements formally to the FO Working Group. Once the FO Working Group takes up discussion of a given requirement its discussion in this project should be retired.

Project Activities and Participation

The main project activities are the definition of requirements for FO extensions and the specification of solutions to those requirements. These activities are conducted primarily through the exslfo-discussion@lists.SourceForge.net mailing list, with concensus captured as more formal specification documents maintained on this Web site and in the exslfo CVS repository. See https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exslfo-discussion for subscription information.

As a key motivation for this project is to standardize industry FO practice, all FO implementors are urged to participate.

The discussion forum is public and open to anyone willing to create a SourceForge user ID. If you would like to participate more directly in the development of documents or code for this project, send email to Eliot Kimber, drmacro@yahoo.com. Please include your SourceForge user ID.

EXSLFO Project

Introduction

Relationship To Other Standards Activities

Project Activities and Participation

Project Logistics

Group Members