Re: XSLT vs OmniMark

Subject: Re: XSLT vs OmniMark
From: Louis-Dominique Dubeau <ldd@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 07 Mar 2000 07:30:25 -0500
Linda van den Brink <lvdbrink@xxxxxxx> writes:

> But I was very disappointed to find out that Omnimark's parser doesn't work
> with well-formed XML, only valid XML. I needed a tool to transform
> well-formed XML so I went back to using XSLT. When I compared the two
> languages during the time I was using them both, I felt that XSLT is a
> nicer, easier, more intuitive, and more flexible (I'm looking for the right
> word here) language to use for precisely the task for which it was built -
> transforming XML documents, well-formed or valid. Omnimark can do loads of
> other useful stuff very well, though; it's very powerful. 

I see you like XSLT.  Here are further thoughts about this.  XSLT by
itself might not be able to beat Omnimark but XSLT+[some scripting
language] might.  So, okay, from an abstract point of view where you
compare the different tools by themselves this is "cheating" because
it is not just XSLT.  However, in real life, this is the kind of
solution that can solve a problem without requiring too much money or
time.  You get XSLT to do most of the work and you do what you can't
do with XSLT with a scripting language like Perl or Python.  The XSLT
stylesheet can even embed markers in the output to help the script
that does the final processing.

For instance, my resume is now an XML file to which I apply an XSL
stylesheet to turn it into HTML, ASCII or PDF (with the help of FOP).
(My resume usually serves as my "hello, world" when I learn stylesheet
languages: I did the same with DSSSL.)  The problem with XSL is that
the ASCII version looks terrible if I don't clean it up.  So what I do
is that for the ASCII version, it outputs only the contents of the
tags plus control codes that happen to look like tags.  For example, I
have <inc> to increase the indentation level and <dec> to decrease it.
So this output is piped through a Perl script that interprets the
codes and transforms the stream accordingly.  It's about one page of
code.  The output of the script is then piped to "fmt" to do line
wrapping and to "recode" to turn iso-8859-1 characters to something
acceptable in ASCII.

I have started exploring using VB to process the output of my cleanup
script to create a nice Word document but I haven't gotten to it yet.

	Regards,
	ldd


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