Some of the previous heated discussion on whether the FO tree could be created without knowledge of the Area Tree apparently has been answered by the XSL specification, with Peter West's view being correct. Property resolution *does* in some areas rely on knowledge of the Area Tree, and the XML Result Tree --> FO Tree --> Area Tree does not always occur in a sequential manner.
If this issue comes up again, Peter, next time just point to the spec! Glen http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/slice3.html#fo-jc-intro Ch. 3 Spec: "Central to this model of formatting is refinement. This is a computational process which finalizes the specification of properties based on the attribute values in the XML result tree. Though the XML result tree and the formatting object tree have very similar structure, it is helpful to think of them as separate conceptual entities. Refinement involves -propagating the various inherited values of properties (both implicitly and those with an attribute value of "inherit"), -evaluating expressions in property value specifications into actual values, which are then used to determine the value of the properties, -converting relative numerics to absolute numerics, -constructing some composite properties from more than one attribute Some of these operations (particularly evaluating expressions) depend on knowledge of the area tree. Thus refinement is not necessarily a straightforward, sequential procedure, but may involve look-ahead, back-tracking, or control-splicing with other processes in the formatter. Refinement is described more fully in [5 Property Refinement / Resolution]." __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/