Subject: Re: [xsl] xml-stylesheet p.i. and other options From: Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 03:33:30 -0600 (MDT) |
David Carlisle wrote: > The point of XML was to be a lightweight form so that the source itself > could be served over the web rather than doing it SGML style and doing > the transformation at the production side. I think we all tend to say on this list what the point of this or that was, but we weren't at those meetings, and we all know that XML gets used for all kinds of things, some reasonable and some absurd. The number of times we scold people for using d-o-e because they insist on treating markup as cdata in their input but not their output should be testament to that :) I think the point was for it to be a vehicle for data interchange, upon which things like web applications can be built. Transforming and adding semantics is all much higher level stuff. > Once you have a document, you might want to do other things with it. Not > least, print it. A Docbook+MathML+SVG (or XHTML+MathML+SVG) > document is a lot more useful and content rich than an HTML file with a > pile of gifs. Of course it is, but if you've said in your Docbook XML that if I want to style it, I've got to use stylesheet 'my-custom-docbook-to-html4.xsl' with it, then that doesn't do me any good if I needed XSLFO, does it? > > That's another thing about the p.i. -- an application is free to ignore it. > > Under what circumstances is that *ever* okay, in a real world application? > > Any application is free to ignore anything, a PI is no different from an > element. <script <style <object; none of these are guaranteed to have any > effect. My point exactly. So if you are pointing the masses to yourDoc.xml that contains <?xml-stylesheet href="yourOneAndOnlyWayToTransformIt.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>, then you hopefully aren't expecting that yourDoc will always be processed with that stylesheet. If you can live with the "maybe" and if you can live with that being the only stylesheet that you'll ever need, then there's no harm. But if your data is more general and its recipients more varied in how they need to interpret it, then the PI is less and less appealing. And more importantly, why should you have left it up to the client anyway? I suppose it's nice to have the choice, but it seems like you hardly ever, in the case of XSLT applications, want to risk having your XML to go 'unstyled'. > > But that's what people do every day, probably in far greater numbers with > > server-side solutions than with the xml-stylesheet p.i. > > If they are server side solutions then aren't they shipping html rather > than XML? Why assume that? I've worked on applications that dealt with 6 kinds of XML in, 2 kinds of XML (for different automated recipients) and 6 kinds of HTML (for humans with web browsers) out. There were like 8 different stylesheets, thus requiring some external logic to select which importing stylesheet to invoke, based on who needed it and what the input was. Can't do that with xml-stylesheet, and the input XML wasn't even under my control, it was coming from elsewhere; I wasn't about to tell them to start hard-coding PIs so we could "maybe" offload some of the processing to some of the clients. - Mike ____________________________________________________________________________ mike j. brown | xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/ denver/boulder, colorado, usa | resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/ XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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