Proposal: Regions ordering

Hello XSL Editors,

The XSL FO Specifications 1.0 and 1.1 do not specify an order regions are placed on a page. The order of regions is quite important when regions are overlapping or some object is placed out of a region. Currently, an ordering of regions is only supported with Antenna House XSL Formatter in the following way:

An order of regions on a page is specified in a simple-page-master by the order of description of region. For example, let simple-page-master specify 3 regions:

<fo:region-before ...> ... </fo:region-before>
<fo:region-body ...> ... </fo:region-body>
<fo:region-after ...> ... </fo:region-after>

Then the region-before is placed on a page, then the region-body is placed, and after that the region-after is placed. This order allow put watermarks in a header. I think this very convinient and useful in many cases.

For this example, Apache FOP ignores an order of regions and always places regions in the order they should be specified, i.e. region-body, region-before, region-after, etc. RenderX XEP produces a warning that region order is incorrect and works as FOP. 

The proposal is the following:

The order of regions in a simple-page-master can be any. This order specifies an order regions are places on a page produced with this master.

I think this proposal is easy for emplementation and it can be included into XSL FO 1.1.

Sincerely,
Alexander I Rozhenko