RE: [xsl] newbie question on formatting

["Michael Kay" <mhk@xxxxxxxxx>]

XSLT 1.0 is primarily there for processing the trees created by parsing
your already-marked-up XML documents. It's not nearly as useful when the
task you want to perform is to create markup by recognizing patterns in
the text. You can do this, but it's really hard work.

XSLT 2.0 is much better at these so-called "up-conversion" applications
because it supports regular expression matching on the text. So you need
to make a decision:

(a) are you going to try to automate the markup process?

(b) if so, what technology are you going to use: XSLT 1.0, XSLT 2.0, or
something else?

Michael Kay

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Renzo
> Sent: 31 December 2003 02:16
> To: XSL-List@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [xsl] newbie question on formatting
> 
> 
> hi -
> 
> this is a newbie question for which i could not find an answer in the 
> faqs. sorry if it is covered there and i didn't see it.
> 
> i am trying to come up with a simple xml that i can process 
> against an 
> xsl to get html (for now, eventually, i will want PDF output 
> as well). 
> for the most part, this is working fine with
> 
> java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -HTML -DIAG -IN foo.xml 
> -XSL bar.xsl 
> -OUT foobar.html
> 
> now, one problem that i don't know a straightforward solution for is 
> this: say i have an xml element
> 
> <element>my name is foobar</element>
> 
> that i want to turn into an html snippet
> 
> <p>my name is <a href="mailto:foobar@xxxxxxxxxx";>foobar</a></p>
> 
> what's the best solution?
> 
> - i obviously don't want <a> tags and such in the xml; even if i did, 
> org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process strips them out, as one might expect
> - ideally, i also don't want to tag 'foobar' in the xml in 
> any other way 
> (say <link attr="foobar">foobar</link>), since a) i'd like to 
> have the 
> xml as clean as possible, so that it becomes easily editable 
> for someone 
> even more of a newbie than myself and b) if i wanted to use 
> the xml for 
> a non-html output, then <link> no longer makes much sense
> - one possibility i was considering is having a list of foobar-like 
> items as entities and then globally replace these with what's 
> appropriate, something simple like
> 
> <item>
>  <name>foobar</name>
>  <link>mailto:foobar@xxxxxxxxxx</link>
>  <style>bold</style>
> </item>
> 
> so that for html output, it gets turned into an mailto href 
> (although i 
> am not sure about the specifics of that), and for pdf output, 
> into bold text
> 
> this somehow doesn't feel right, so i am wondering whether there is a 
> better and straightforward way.
> 
> the same question of course relates to any other kind of 
> formatting that 
> applies to items that are not themselves containers (such as table 
> cells, etc)
> 
> thanks
> renzo
> 
> 
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> 


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