Second Working Draft of XSL 2.0

Inasmuch as significant new work – such as non-rectangular shapes and copyfitting – has been done since the first public working draft of XSL 2.0, the second working draft is now available at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslfo20/. Two of the biggest additions are non-rectangular areas and copyfitting.

Non-rectangular areas and copyfitting may seem like radical new steps for XSL FO, but they are both in the first XSL Requirements Summary published in 1998! One thing that has changed since 1998 is that now XSL can say “area shapes will be SVG”, and everybody will nod wisely and get on with implementing or using non-rectangular areas expressed in SVG. Back in 1998, there was no SVG and no other standard way of expressing shapes that could have been nearly as usable for the purposes of XSL FO.