Q&A

Are XSL-FO documents usually coded by hand?

No. In fact, XSL-FO is intended to be generated automatically using a transformation language such as XSLT. In a real-world scenario, you would likely use XSLT to automatically transform an XML document into an XSL-FO document, and then use an XSL-FO processor to generate a PDF document automatically. All these steps would take place behind the scenes without any manual involvement. In this lesson I showed you the "brute force" method to creating an XSL-FO document by hand and converting it to PDF so that you could better understand how the XSL-FO language works.

Should I consider switching from CSS to XSL-FO to style my XML documents?

It depends entirely upon your specific circumstances. If you're talking about styling XML documents for the web, the answer is currently a resounding no. There just isn't enough XSL-FO browser support to consider it a viable web technology at the moment. However, if you're talking about styling XML content for print, XSL-FO may very well be a good option as a high-powered replacement for CSS.