Re: [xsl] [XSL] extracting a verse

[Jeni Tennison <jeni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David,

>> Well, I think that your stylesheet demonstrates that the easiest
>> way to approach this problem is to use a serial, SAX-like process
>> rather than a tree-based process
>
> Yes, well it would be easier, except that after a long day at
> Euroweb 2002, it's easier to write XSLT in your sleep than to go
> into that alien world of imperative programing where variables keep
> changing all the time..

Sure, for XSLT geeks like yourself :) That's what I meant about
wanting to use XSLT for "other reasons".

I'm feeling particularly burned by this because I recently had to use
XSLT to process MIF to create HTML. MIF is designed to be used by a
serial processor and contains a lot of overlapping structures which
are a nightmare to disentangle using XSLT. My customer wanted to use
XSLT for "other reasons", but the result is not pretty.

> Isn't overlaying the linear verse/line structure with the nested
> element structure something that your son-of-XML language is
> supposed to be better at?

Yep, but it's only better at representing the structure, not (yet) at
manipulating it. LMNL (www.lmnl.org) syntax would represent the
overlapping structure as:

[quote}
[verse}No! penury, inertness and grimace,{verse]
[verse}In some strange sort, were the land's portion. [q}See{verse]
[verse}Or shut your eyes,{q] said Nature peevishly,{verse]
[verse}[q}It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:{verse]
[verse}'Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place,{verse]
[verse}Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.{q]{verse]
{quote]

And conceptually it would be seen as the string "No! penury, ...
prisoners free." with the tags indicating 'ranges' over the string.

Most of Wendell's examples are from the LMNL and JITT corpus, I
think.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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