Re: Side effects and large-scale conversion

Subject: Re: Side effects and large-scale conversion
From: Chris Maden <crism@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 10:35:04 -0400
[David Megginson]
> The problem -- I suspect -- is that you are creatively abusing Jade.

Absolutely.  And I'm fully aware of it, but I needed to convert to
MIF, and Jade would do it.  I regard the limitations as challenges,
not problems. (-:

> A MIF-specific DSSSL formatting engine would maintain something like
> a font and flag stack internally (say, in C, C++, or Java code) and
> would restore the previous context automatically, as does Jade's RTF
> backend.  DSSSL was not designed for dealing with low-level,
> format-specific details in user code.

Yep.  But I've got a pretty good workaround by just restoring the
current state after any child of a certain type.  (The stylesheet on
my Web site reflects this for inlines, but not sub-paragraphs.)

> Given your current requirements, however, is there any way that you
> could pass down context information using inherited characteristics?

Not without abusing the SGML back-end even further.  I'm not creating
nested flow objects, except for sosofos.  Everything is either an
entity or a formatting-instruction, and the formatting-instructions
won't take content expressions, so there's really no way to pass
characteristics down; the flow tree is fairly flat.

-Chris
-- 
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