Re: [xsl] plea for help...

[Alex von Thorn <avt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I did this. I had a specific requirement and I tailored the XSL for 
the results I needed.

I have a bunch of people who create documentation. In time gone by, 
they would do whatever: web pages, Word files, Visio documents, 
graphic files, posting email to the group, printing up things and 
taping it to their cubicle walls, whatever. So I had everybody 
"standardize" on HTML. Well, everybody composed in their own way. 
Worse than that, many of them composed in nasty Microsoft web 
authoring applications, while others just used vi, and it was 
essentially impossible to edit a page with vi after something from 
Microsoft has edited it.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted all the pages to have a similar look, 
with similar fonts, navigation, and top layout; XML was the solution. 
I created a document standard, creating <section> and <subsection> 
elements and a bunch of other stuff (almost 2000 lines in the XSL 
file). The XML files are about half the size of the HTML files; the 
team says that it's so much easier to do the XML files (once they 
wrap their heads around the paradigm, errors and strangeness have 
almost vanished, anything that can be turned into well-formed XML 
that can be interpreted by the XSL file once can be edited in the 
future, all the pages look similar, making it easy for users to find 
the information they are looking for, and the quantity and quality of 
output has increased because XML/XSL works better. As our company 
changes name, logo, and colors, I can just edit the XSL stylesheet 
and poof, the whole intranet changes. No schmancy document-management 
system required (because we get no budget for intranet development, 
people just expect us to know everything right away when someone asks).

My specific solution is specific. In general, if you have a big site, 
if you have some consistency with the content or data in it, and you 
know what you need from it, it may well be possible to get very good 
results from XML with XSL.


The key here is to look at your HTML (or XHTML) and identify patterns 
in how you organize the information. The patterns can be abstracted 
to define XML elements; the exceptions and details can become 
attributes, child elements, or ordinary text content.



At 3/9/2006 01:10 AM, xsl-list-digest-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 00:28:58 +0100 (CET)
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> From: Florent Georges <darkman_spam@xxxxxxxx>
> Subject: RE: [xsl] plea for help...
> Message-ID: <20060308232858.24754.qmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Walter Torres wrote:
>
> >  1) convert HMTL into well formed HTML (many are not)
> >  2) convert well formed HTML into xHTML
>
>   Tidy HTML will give you XHTML from HTML.
>
> >  3) convert xHTML into XML
>
>   An XHTML instance is already an XML instance.  If you want to
> translate the instance from XHTML to an other XML document type, XSLT
> may be of great help.
>
> >  4) create XSLTs to transpose XML back to HTML for page display
>
>   Here again, XSLT may be of great help.
>
>   Regards,
>
> --drkm

Alex von Thorn
http://worldhouse.com/alex/

"It is often easier to fight for a principle than to live up to it." 
-- Adlai Stevenson