Yeah, code is being executed all right. I had ns_log in there and -colspec gets read and if you call template::multirow size it returns 6 -- the number of rows in the created multirow!
I am using XHTML2FO XSL stylesheet as picked up from Antenna House website here: http://www.antennahouse.com/XSLsample/XSLsample.htm
Works very well. What I do is a bit of a hack, really: I fetch (rather wget) the page, pass it through tidy to make sure that all that has to be quoted is, then apply XSL transformation using xsltproc. Once .fo is generated I use FOP to produce a .pdf out of it.