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Annotation to transformation (was Re: Future of XSL-FO)

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Annotation to transformation (was Re: Future of XSL-FO)
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 12:53:52 -0400
• In-reply-to: <003101c2768e$0b8cddd0$6500000a@KENNY>

David Rosenborg writes:
>But when I think of it, we really don't have to wait for XSL-FO 2 for
>this to happen. XSL-FO++ (with CSS) could be handled in a preprocessor
>yielding XSL-FO 1.0 as its output.

I've been trying to get around to writing a toolkit that does pretty
much that, though probably with a limited (structure-only) set of
selectors.  

As fond as I am of the CSS annotation approach, it seems more and more
that some means of making those annotations explicit in the document
might be useful on occasion, especially in cases where we'd like to
further transform annotated documents.  

CSS is probably the most common case (and presentation-centric), but
it's not hard to see other cases where combining external annotations
with markup to produce markup explicitly annotated with attributes would
be a good thing.  Linkbases are another possible case, and I can at
least dream of interactions between XML documents and RDF.  

(The PSVI is another possibility, but its provision of additional
information about attributes makes it a lot more difficult to express as
XML without major structural changes to the document.  Linkbases
referencing ranges through XPointer also could make this difficult.)

The W3C has a (Java) CSS parser available:
http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2002/css-validator/

That may or may not be a good starting place for people who want to do
this kind of thing.  As I'm working on XML parsers and similar low-level
stuff right now, I suspect I'll end up writing my own parser... someday!

-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

• References:
  • Re: Future of XSL-FO at W3C??
    • From: "David Rosenborg" <darolst@p...>

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