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Re: XSLT and Schemas

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: XSLT and Schemas
• From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@C...>
• Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 08:50:45 -0300
• In-reply-to: <004d01c36bc7$827622b0$05a8a8c0@MarcusNB>

At 2003-08-26 13:45 +0200, Marcus Andersson wrote:
>I'm building some sort of XML editor (yet another one).
>...
>I would prefer doing this with XSLT

The syntax of an XML document is important to humans but irrelevant to XML 
processors provided the syntax is well-formed.  XSLT assumes the downstream 
consumer of the result of transformation is a processor, so many syntactic 
issues of transformation are out of the hands of the stylesheet 
writer.  XPath, upon which XSLT performs its work, is an abstraction of the 
information found in an XML document, not an abstraction of the syntax used 
in an XML document.

If you are planning to edit XML at a syntactic level and provide such 
features as "input syntax preservation", then you will have to utilize an 
abstraction that preserves syntactic issues of an XML document, so you will 
not be able to use XPath or XSLT as the basis of your work.

The DOM provides more information about syntax than does XPath.  Whether 
you can build all that you need on standard DOM or whether you will have to 
extend it with further functionality to preserve the kinds of information 
not preserved by DOM will be up to you.

I hope this helps.

................. Ken


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