Re: XSL support in Jade

[James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Over on XSL-List Russell Grigaitis wrote:
> 
> I would like to know what is happening on the "DSSSL as a super set of XSL"
> front.
> 
> More specifically, is James Clark planning on added the XSL syntax to Jade
> when XSL becomes a recommendation, or maybe sooner?

If you look at the XSL WD, it's clear that the semantics of both the
tree construction part and the formatting objects part have diverged
significantly from DSSSL (and will probably diverge further), so I don't
think this is a practical approach.

This raises the question of how Jade should evolve.

I would like to be able to use the tree construction part of XSL with
all the Jade backends.  Since the Jade .fot output is XML, you can use
XSL to create it, so all that's needed is a program that takes the .fot
Jade output and feeds it to any of the existing Jade backends. You could
do this to some extent using Jade itself together with an appropriate
stylesheet, but it would be much better to hook up expat to feed the
backends directly.  The FOT format would need to evolve a little bit but
hopefully not much. One problem is that in XSL inheritance is done in
the backend; thus the FOT format needs to have some simple way to
express inherited characteristic values.

Another useful component would be something that translated from the
standard XSL flow objects (once they've matured a bit) into the Jade
.fot format.

If support for the XSL flow objects becomes available, then it would
also be useful to have a Jade backend that generates XSL flow objects.

James


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