Re: alternating tags in a list?

Subject: Re: alternating tags in a list?
From: Ray Cromwell <ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 16:28:26 -0500 (EST)
> You have a fundamental misunderstanding. The tree that results from
> processing an XML document with XSL is an XML node tree. You need not
> "parse" it. You can attack the resulting tree DIRECTLY with the DOM. After
> fiddling with it, you could save it in HTML syntax, or TeX syntax, or
> whatever, but that doesn't affect the shape of the node tree.

Ok, I have an XSL style sheet.  I feed it lots of documents, some of
which are more deeply nested than others.  The output from my XSL
is HTML. Sometimes there is  a table, sometimes not. Sometimes there
are nested tables. And there could be lots of tables. 

I want to add lots of nice presentation gimmicks like "color every other
row in tables that are in this position in the document."

So now I must write Java/Script code that traverses thru the entire
DOM tree trying to find the right tables, positioned in the
right place, before I start coloring them.

I have just written the equivalent of the matching algorithms in
the XSL parser. Why I am using XSL again? If I was going to go
through that trouble, why not just process the entire thing in
Java/Script. Post processing in this case seems like a waste
of my time.

I thought the point of XSL/XQL/etc is so that I don't have to write
all the nasty DOM searching logic.

Imagine that XML was an RDBMS and XSL was SQL. And someone said
"just slurp the entire db into RAM and process your queries
via C++. Here's a low level interface to the database's data
structure."





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