RE: Style vs. transformation

[Jonathan Marsh <jmarsh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

		-----Original Message-----
		From:	Smith, Brooke
[mailto:Brooke.Smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
		Sent:	Wednesday, March 04, 1998 4:18 PM

		Perhaps I'm a little confused about XSL after reading the
Microsoft
		tutorial (http://www.microsoft.com/xml/xsl/).

		I thought that the actions were an output.  Here's what
Lesson #5 says
		essentially:

		The XSL:

		<rule>
		  <target-element/>
		  <DIV>
		    <children/>
		  </DIV>
		</rule>

		would turn:

		<document>
		  <chapter>
		    <title>XSL Overview</title>
		    <topic>Overview of XSL and its extensibility</topic>
		  </chapter>
		</document>

		into:

		<DIV>
		  <DIV>XSL Overview</DIV>
		  <DIV>Overview of XSL and its extensibility</DIV>
		</DIV>

		And thus the action consisted of action commands such as
'<children/>',
		and things that were sent to the output stream such as
'<DIV>' and
		'</DIV>' in this case.  Maybe what Microsoft was talking
about was
		directly connected to their XSL parser which they said only
delivered
		HTML (currently).
There are two types of elements possible within the "action" - flow objects
like <DIV> which are output, and commands like <children/> and
<select-elements/> which control processing by evaluating recursively to a
sub-tree of flow objects.  This is XSL according to the Proposal for XSL,
not a Microsoft derivative.

		The question posed from looking at Omnimark is why use XML
as the XSL
		script, where I see a problem with understanding what are
actions and
		what is the output (Question - is <DIV> different to
<children/>?)?  I
		had a go at learning DSSSL but haven't given it enough of a
go as it
		seems oh so complicated.  XSL seems much simpler though
obviously (for
		me) it causes confusion.  

I don't think you are alone in your confusion, I hope that this is an area
that can be improved.


Jonathan Marsh
phone   425.703.4591
 <mailto:jmarsh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> jmarsh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



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