RE: [xsl] xsl:sort in old MSXML

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Claudio,

As a footnote to what David says, it should be noted that doing things this 
way also helps clarify a huge, murky confusion, namely what processing 
happens in the transform and what happens when the output of the transform 
is loaded by the browser.

Running in batch mode -- even (especially) when prototyping, lets you get a 
good handle on, for example, whatever Javascript you want in your output 
and how it should work -- as a separate design problem from how your 
transform works.

Design your output, including all the fancy client-side scripting behaviors 
in your DHTML. Then design the transform that gets your source into this 
format. (It's been said many times on the list, mostly by David.)

An example of what I mean can be seen in a little project I did last year: 
http://www.piez.org/wendell/Amsel/Amsel.html. This would have been 
impossible to author in HTML natively (check out the HTML source). XML 
through a batch transformation aligns elements for scripting in the result. 
The Javascript is *not* implemented by the transformation engine -- the 
stylesheet that generates this is standards-compliant, pure XSLT, uses no 
Javascript, and can be executed in any compliant XSLT engine. The output 
HTML is loaded up with Javascript -- but the XSLT engine doesn't know about 
this: to it, the Javascript is just another string.

Cheers,
Wendell

At 04:52 PM 7/1/2003, David wrote:
> Wendell meant that rather than fight with complexities of cross-browser
> client side javascript interfaces to XSLT, a simpler and far more
> popular route is to maintain your XML document and your XSLT file "in
> house" and then use a command line xslt program (you can use msxsl.exe
> if you want to stay with MS) to convert your XML files to HTML.
> You then put these HTML pages on your web server. That way they can be
> read by any browser without having to worry about XSLT support.


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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