Re: Generating high-level formatting output

[Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Norman Gray writes:
 > >  <xsl:text>\documentclass{foo}</xsl:text>
 > > or
 > >  <documentclass name="foo"/>
 > 
 > I don't think this gains you anything, unless you know that all you're
 > ever going to be interested in is conversion from XML to LaTeX2e;
well, its like the HTML backend, or your DSSSL extra. no more, no less

 > When I, at least, talk about high-level formatting output, I mean
 > output conforming to some presentation-based DTD (HTML may not be too
 > far from this! (ooooh, bleachhhh, forget I said that -- can of worms)).
if you use a subset of LaTeX, you could generate
 <emph>hello</emph>
and have LaTeX typeset it directly, or CSS render it in red

 > It's that potentially hard/interesting transformation -- rather than
 > the rather easy issue of how you spit out LaTeX -- which needs a
 > powerful language, which to me looks like a better case for DSSSL than XSLT.
unless the XSL people have seriously screwed up, it should be doable
in either

 > The weaknesses of XSLT (gained from a half-hour acquaintance with
..
 >  - I wasn't able to find any obvious way of creating external
 >    entities
but thats a hack in DSSSL as well, surely?

 >    which transforms a source tree to a result tree, but since (a) this
 >    is something one really does want to do, and (b) this desire appears
 >    to me to be legitimate in SGML terms, the omission seems unattractive.
actual XSL processors do support it with extensions, eg XT and
Saxon. Like Jade has extensions...

 >  - It doesn't seem particularly extensible.  It does have the
 >    get-out-of-jail-free card of external functions and system functions,
undoubtedly true. I leave that to language purists

 >  - XSLT just doesn't look very nice.  Even the short fragments
thats life. I dont look very nice either

 >    to, but you _can_ get used to them; the visual clutter of XSLT code
 >    wouldn't go away.
it does, you know, quite quickly.

 >  - XSLT doesn't grok SGML.  For me this is a killer because I want
it could, surely? today, no, but in theory it could

 > I can't see this.  DSSSL is a standard, is well integrated with the grove,
If I may be Devil's advocate, a failed standard is not a meaningful
standard. I *want* to believe that someone will implement the ISO
Standard for DSSSL; I *wish* XSL hadn't been invented (not as much as I
wish the Neanderthal CSS had never seen the light of day); I *want* to
use round brackets. Its just that my wishes tend not to come true.

Think of XSL as genetically-modified DSSSL. Do you expect to see GMO
tomatoes in Sainsburys in 10 years time? you bet you do. Its bad, its
wicked, some of us will try and stay organic and GM free until we die, 
but those tomatoes are coming.....

Sebastian "campaign for organic markup" Rahtz



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