RE: [xsl] Building a Manual with XML/XSL

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2003-09-07 12:58 +0200, Iván Montoro Ten wrote:
> Now I'm thinking if it's possible to make a
> node know which depth do he have in the tree,

Yes, if you had <section> within <section> you can calculate depth and 
reflect the appropriate heading level in the HTML.  I prefer to have nested 
sections than uniquely identified <sect1>, <sect2>, etc.

> By "hard PDF" I mean I realy have no idea about which software do I need

Your XML is run through XSLT with an XSL-FO stylesheet to produce an 
instance of XSL-FO that is interpreted by an engine to produce PDF output.

> (I've seen Apache Forrest do the work quite well, but time to R&D is not
> in my budget)

But, respectfully, *learning* a technology only from asking questions on a 
maillist seems a bit inappropriate to me ... if you would first learn from 
the many books and tutorials that are available from many places, or attend 
a training course where the languages are taught, then you can use the mail 
list as a resource for getting help with specific problems.

I mentioned last message that we are teaching a public course in Europe 
this month (students brand new to XSL are producing HTML and PDF outputs 
from in class) http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/ and two other companies 
(not listed in any particular order) that have talented XSL trainers are:

  - Mulberry Technologies - http://www.MulberryTech.com
  - ISOGEN International - http://www.ISOGEN.com

Asking for concepts from the list helps to put these languages in 
perspective, but I think it is important for you to learn the languages 
off-list and then come to the list when you have problems with what you 
have learned.  I don't mean to be disrespectful in this suggestion.

> Using attributes as titles of my sections was just for an example. I have
> not finished the XML structure yet

An excellent collection of opinions is maintained by Robin Cover at:

  http://xml.coverpages.org/elementsAndAttrs.html

There you will see my opinion that language text is coerced into #PCDATA 
and machine text is coerced into attributes.  I go to great lengths at 
times to enforce this in my structures.

> Now, imagine I want this manual to be included in a PHP/JSP page. Is there
> any easy way to exclude everything but the body in the resulting HTML? I
> would like to have a third version of the manual: HTML, PDF and HTML for
> includes inside my website (in the middle of a table, for example).

Vendors of XSLT engines provide extensions allowing you to produce multiple 
outputs.  These output can be XML documents, XML external parsed general 
entities, HTML fragments or simple text.

> I'm wondering also why xalan does not complain if I don't have a DTD/XSD
> for my XML. Is not necessary?

Again, a *very* basic XML question.  While SGML required a document model 
in order to interpret the markup being used, XML has sufficient syntactic 
constraints that a processor can fully interpret the hierarchical structure 
without the use of a document model.  So to answer your question, yes, the 
DTD/XSD is not necessary.

> And the last question, even less related to XSL: I want to make a little
> script (shell script) to xalan all xml files in a directory structure.
> As xalan needs the XSL file to apply to the XML I need to extract it from
> the XML file. Anybody could tell me the regexp who could make this for me?
> (I'm also open to any other parser suggestions)

I often utilize an XSLT structure to read my XML documents of filenames and 
synthesize shell scripts for subsequent execution, because the text output 
method produces files without any markup escaping, thus they can be safely 
interpreted by shells and command-line interpreters.  No regexp is 
required, so perhaps I misunderstand your question.

Good luck in your learning of this technology ... you will find it very 
powerful.

................... Ken

--
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G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/
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