With your particular footer sample there is a possibility to get a confusing footer text “page 3 of 1”. So some mechanism to impact $[total] value is also needed. That was a reason we did not copy the feature from PD4PageMark to inline HTML headers/footers.
We could add the feature to , but first we need to review typical use cases and to think how to keep everything consistent there. Of course, we would appreciate your input.