Re: API to formatters and grove engines

[Paul Prescod <papresco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jean-Xavier Lotthé wrote:
> Definitely, yes !
> As far as I know, but I may be wrong, this extension does not yet exist.
> Are there any other solutions as for now ?
> How do you, list members, embed DSSSL into your aplications then ?

I don't, yet. The DSSSL specification seems to be designed to process
full documents, not nodes. I don't know if Jade can be easily changed to
do so or if the programmer would have to build up a large "environment"
to pretend that other nodes (for instance parents) had already been
processed.

You seem to be only using a small fraction of Jade's power, though. Why
don't you just walk the grove tree from Visual Basic code and spit out
the strings you want to spit out? Is DSSSL code much more powerful for
what you are trying to do than VB code? It just seems like you are going
to a lot of effort to incorporate Jade but you aren't really interested
in the query engine or the formatters. All you want is a nice language
for transforming SGML documents into some other text format. Admittedly,
most other languages can't yet plug into an existing Grove, but VB can
(though VB's text handling may be sub-optimal).

Processing a section of a document and outputting strings seems much
more in the "spirit" of the transformation language. Maybe your advance
request will encourage James to design Jade's transformation language
support (whenever it comes about...) with a nice OLE interface that can
work on nodes and subtrees.

 Paul Prescod

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