Re: [xsl] Convert JSON to XML?

["Liam R. E. Quin liam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2025-05-02 at 12:07 +0000, Michael B Allen ioplex@xxxxxxxxx
wrote:
>
> <address
> B  street="123 Main St"
> B  city="Townville"
> B  state="PA"/>

A good rule of thumb for document-oriented information in XML is that
anything user-facing should be in text content, and attributes are for
"properties' of that information. This was also suggested in the SGML
standard and amplified i think in the SGML Handbook.

Let's suppose you have a town on the border between Germany and Poland,
and you need to give both names for it in the address, marking each
with its language using xml:lang. You cannot do that with attributes.

However, i do agree that there isnbt a single JSON to XML conversion.

Consider

B  B "key names" {
B  B  B  "/" : "slash",
B  B  B  "<" : "less than",
B  B  B "slash" : "/",
B  B  "less than" : "/"
}
(the / would need to be escaped as \/ when the JSON was embedded in
JavaScript)

Are you going to try to make elements called "/" and "less than"?
Clearly not.

You can use a hybrid approach,
B  B  <key-names>
B  B  B  B  <json:item key="/" value="slash" />
B  B  B  B  <slash>/</slash>
B  B  </key-names>

but now you have something harder to process, and, worse, you might be
40 megabytes into it before you get the first json:item or json:map or
whatever, on the five thousandth run, and it didn't show up in testing
so wasn't handled....

> Anyway, my point is that the only "correct" way to convert JSON to
> XML is to understand in advance which of the many XML representations
> is "correct" for your particular application and then write code to
> explicitly perform that conversion.

Here we do agree :)

liam

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Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
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