RE: [xsl] Transforming XML Blockquotes - Mixed Content - XSLT 1.0 Solution

Subject: RE: [xsl] Transforming XML Blockquotes - Mixed Content - XSLT 1.0 Solution
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 17:42:12 -0400
Hi again Edward,

At 03:59 PM 4/20/2005, you wrote:
It's not so much that I even want to use DOE, as I feel as if I am being pushed into it. It seems as if the alternative is either (1) the possibility of an overly complex solution, (2) living with bugs introduced by IE, (3) present the document text in a grammatically incorrect manner, or (4) change the source XML to a more IE friendly but logically incorrect format.

Isn't DOE the lesser of the 4 evils?

Quite possibly the least, yes.


But I hinted at a (5): use a more permissive structure in your output, such as <div>, with a @class qualifier if you like. It's may not appear as "correct" as blockquote from the semantic point of view, but then blockquote was never very well specified.... I dare say most blockquotes aren't block quotes at all. :->

I guess that's why I asked the question, because I am both pissed that there is no easy solution for a common situation and, without the level of experience of others here, I feel unable to differentiate between the "evils" of the choices I am now faced with.

That's fair enough. But that's also why we're here. Both to warn of possible pitfalls in the road ahead, and to help explain the complexities.


BTW there won't be any thunderbolts from heaven if you decide to use d-o-e ... as we said, how bad it is likely to be is one of those things that Depends.

How did the creators of XSL envision the handling of these nested block level elements?

I don't know: you'd have to ask them yourself. In general I think they'd point to the line in the spec that limited XSLT 1.0's goals to down-conversions. (And indeed if you only had to spill the paragraph's contents, not group contiguous nodes within it based on the element type of their neighbors, you'd have no problem.)


FWIW, you're not the only one with these headaches. Indeed, for some kinds of markup tasks (think: "overlap!") it's worse than just XSLT -- it's the whole "XML is really a tree" dogma (on which so many XML technologies are based). Tag-writing used to be much more prevalent and much more acceptable than it has become in the Age of Trees.

Take a look at

http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0502&L=tei-l&F=&S=&P=170

and the thread from whence it springs.

Cheers,
Wendell


====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================

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