Re: alternating tags in a list?

Subject: Re: alternating tags in a list?
From: Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 16:15:45 -0600
Keith Visco wrote:
> 
> It might not always be the case that my end result allows me to create
> nice useful nodes in my XSL result-tree. If I wanted nice useful nodes
> in my result tree, I would have simply used the XML document, and not
> processed it at all with XSL.  

That is not true at all. The output of the transform is a *different set*
of nice, useful nodes. You transform not because you want to map nodes to
strings, but because you want to map nodes to other nodes.

> XSL is a transformation language, at
> least that's what I thought it was. I take my nicely structured, and
> easily DOM traversable XML document, and process it with XSL. What I get
> out, might be another nicely structured,  easily DOM traversable XML
> document, or it might be an RTF file or PDF file or JPEG image.

That isn't true. XSL alone can only translate XML into XML. You can
translate that XML into PDF, RTF or a JPEG, but XSL itself does not help
with that (though a particular XML implementation might add that as a nice
extension feature).

If the output is RTF or PDF, those languages still have structure and
still have nodes. They can be represented in a DOM. You can manipulate the
DOM with scripts. THEN you can save them as RTF or PDF.

I think that creating a JPEG directly from XSL's output is very unlikely.
JPEGs are not even textual.

> I believe you are suggesting the following: Once an XSL processor has
> constructed the result tree, it passes the tree off to a separate
> program for "POST/PRE"-processing. The new result tree is then returned
> to the XSL processor for interpretation.

XSL processors do not interpret the output trees. They transform node
trees to node trees. The resulting node tree is displayed by some other
piece of software: a browser, a converter, etc. So if the second piece of
software wants to modify the tree before displaying or converting it, it
may.

> I hope I didn't give the impression that I wanted an XSL processor to be
> my word processor...I simply stated that the result tree, could in fact
> be comprised of lots of text elements, and therefor not as easily
> traversable as one would like.

If you are generating a bunch of text and not using XSL's structured
output facilities then you are probably doing something wrong.

 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

"Sports utility vehicles are gated communities on wheels" - Anon


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