Border and padding in paged media

Hello all,

I read in the paged media description
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/page.html#page-box that border and padding
properties do not apply to pages, and I was wondering what would be
the reason for it. I can find a number of possible applications;
indeed, I came across this limitation because I was looking for a way
to draw a rather thickish border on the left and bottom margins of the
page in projection mode (I'm using Opera). So the first question is:
why?

Of course, an alternative solution would be to draw such borders using
appropriately dimensioned, absolutely positioned divs, but (1) this
would be a horrible hack and (2) there is no way (I know of) to put
something on all pages. So the second question is: is there a way to
do (2)?

Thanks in advance for the attention,

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta