Re: dl/dt/dd matching

[Francois Belanger <francois@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

James Clark wrote on 11/01/99 22h31:

>Francois Belanger wrote:
>> 
>> I'm scratching my head on this one.
>
>I've been scratching my head for years on this one.  It's a problem in
>DSSSL too.
>
>> What were trying to do is layout a suite of dt/dd within a dl as a table
>> with a row for each dt. Since there's no container for each dt (the
>> corresponding dl are siblings, not children of the dt node), how can one
>> start a new row for each dt and express that in XSL?
>
>XSL can't handle this at the moment, but I think it needs to.

Definitvely, this issue rises from time to time, and not only with 
dl/dd/dt.

>One solution is to allow nodes to be grouped together:
>
>[[A1, B1], [A2, B2], [A3, B3]]
>
>and then specify an operation f on the results of groups, thus getting
>
>f(r(A1) + r(B1)) + f(r(A2) + r(B2)) + f(r(A3) + r(B3))
>
>For example, it might look like this:
>
><xsl:template match="dl">
>  <table>
>    <xsl:for-each select="dt|dd">
>      <xsl:group start="dt">
>         <tr><xsl:contents/></tr>
>      </xsl:group>
>      <td><xsl:apply-templates/></td>
>    </xsl:for-each>
>  </table>
></xsl:template>
>
>xsl:group modifies the operation of xsl:for-each and xsl:apply-templates
>just as xsl:sort does.  The start attribute is a match pattern that
>specifies the nodes that start a group; the content specifies what to do
>with the result of processing the members of the group; within
>xsl:group, xsl:contents refers to the result of appending the results of
>processing the members of the group.

My prefered approach, altough the xsl:macro-like xsl:contents is not that 
intuitive and reading it does not show how the output will nest. How 
about:

<xsl:template match="dl">
  <table>
    <xsl:for-each select="group(dt)">
         <tr><xsl:apply-templates/></tr>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </table>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="dt|dd">
    <td>
      <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </td>
</xsl:template>

This way one can see that the tr will enclose the td.

>xsl:continue says the content gets added to the previous sibling in the
>result element tree.   This is simpler but has some problems.

It's maybe simpler to write but the xsl:group or my proposition seems 
more flexible.

Maybe both xsl:continue and xsl:group are needed?



Francois Belanger
Sitepak, Bringing Internet Business into Focus
http://www.sitepak.com



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