RE: Fw: Is there a way to define groups of templates ?

Subject: RE: Fw: Is there a way to define groups of templates ?
From: bclose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bethany Close)
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 12:01:47 -0400
James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx> Wrote:

>Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:
>> Suppose that it was valid to say:
>>

>Also remember that the intended audience for XSL isn't people
like you
>(or I suspect most of the people on this list).  I would guess
most
>people on this list are comfortable writing a perl script or
maybe a bit
>javascript.

I beg to differ. I could trivially abandon XSL and XML and use
another
mechanism for doing my file conversions. By using Java/JavaScript
I could
even do so with browsers and be pretty portable. But I really
rather not do
so.

The reason is that I believe (hope?) that XML/XSL would bring a
measure of
sanity to the structured file format chaos we have today. When
(if?) this
will happen, XML/XSL support would be very widespread - built
into browsers,
operating systems, indexing tools, and so on. I want my
application to be
part of that - even if it is "batch processing" and "could be
done in perl".

>  If XSL is to succeed, it must be accessible to people who
>don't have those kinds of skills (eg graphic artists).  Although
setting
>and accessing variables is easy and intuitive for programmers or
people
>with programming experience, it isn't so good for
non-programmers.


I very seriously doubt that XSL would be hand-written by graphic
artists.
HTML (without scripting) is by far simpler then XSL. Personally I
write HTML
using 'vi', but graphic artists use WYSIWYG HTML
editors/generators. This
does not mean HTML is "inaccessible" to them. XSL, being more
complex (if
statements, pattern matching, macros...) would go that way much
faster then
HTML did.

We shouldn't feel bad about this. The "lets make it so simple
anyone can use
it" approach has never worked in the past. It never will. The
best we can
achieve is "lets make it simple enough anyone can use it for
simple things".
XML, HTML and XSL do that pretty well.

Hello out there, I'm one that falls into that "graphic artist
nature". Thank you James for bringing this point back into view -
for the past few weeks I've been working on a DTD and now I'm
tackling the XSL - for this first pass I am not using WYSIWYG.
Any tips you can throw my way would be much appreciated. However
at the present I've hit a stumbling block, and maybe one of you
can help me over this. How do I combine sub-elements from
different major elements, without losing other elements.
For example, I have a document DTD that contains elements A & B.
Within A there are C, D, E, F elements and within B there are 1,
2, 3, 4 elements.
<A>
<C> ABC </C>
<D> DEF </D>
<E> GHI </E>
<F> JKL </F>
</A>
<B>
<1> MNO </1>
<2> PQR </2>
<3> STU </3>
<4> VWX </4>
</B>

This is now is pretty straightforward, however I would like to
apply a style sheet that allows the out put to be
Along the following lines:
ABCDEF
GHIMNOPQR
JKL
STUVWX
Mixing up the order of elements within A & B, but ensuring that
all are eventually accounted for in the final output.

Thoughts?
Thanks in advance, Beth


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