Table layout in fo output

Hi,

My documents contain al lot of tables and I'd like have some more 
control over the layout. Setting borders and backgound color etc for 
each cell becomes a bit tedious...So what I was thinking was the following:

It would be nice if I could set the layout for the entire table by 
setting the 'role' attribute for the <table> element and create a 
customization layer to create the style for the table. I've seen the 
example in the Docbook XSL guide about row background colors 
(http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/BGtableColor.html#d0e27273). But 
this only works for html ouput and not for FO output.

The effect of this should be somewhat like applying a table style in MS 
Word.

Does this work? and if so can someone point me in the right direction? 
(I know how to use docbook, but I'm not a XSL guru)

Cheers,

Danny