Re: [xsl] Text markup for web forums, eg. [b]bold text[/b]

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:31 AM 6/1/2004, George wrote:
> How about translating also <> to [] in the first pass and apply in a 
> second pass a copy stylesheet with the output method set to xml this time 
> that will translate the [] back to <> ?

George is being very cunning, but the bottom line here is that none of 
these approaches have yet proposed a good way of dealing with pseudo-markup 
that does not map directly to well-formed XML. And by definition, you have 
no intrinsic way of knowing that all the pseudo-markup you have, does map.

(The reason you can't just change markup delimiters around in XSLT is that 
internally, the XSLT engine sees no markup; it has all been parsed away in 
the tree-building process.)

Whether you work at the character level (translating back and forth between 
different markup delimiters) or try to implement a parser in XSLT (M. 
David's first approach) -- unless you have a generic solution for 
converting not-well-formed near-XML into true XML (and it won't be XSLT 
;-), this isn't going to work outside controlled environments where you can 
either preclude badly-formed pseudo-markup altogether (in which case why 
not use real markup?), or where you can trap it and fix it when it turns up.

Cheers,
Wendell

> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <text>
> <value>Text may &lt; contain [b]bold text[/b], [i]italics[/i] or both
> [b][i]bold and italics[/i][/b].</value>
> </text>


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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