[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XSL and Device-Independent Formatting
Andrew Bunner writes: > The moral of the story is that if your target language is not > XML, then you have to write your own tool to take it from XML to, > let's say, HTML. One way is to get into the XSL processor and add > your own code, another (less clean) way is to write something that > post-processes the XML representation of the target language. <warning>I have not had the opportunity to spend much time with the new XSL WD yet, so my answer is based on general practice rather than the specific process defined in the XSL WD.</warning> I think that people are over-thinking the problem. Try this on for size: an XSL formatter produces a device-independent formatting tree, then can render the same tree in different concrete formats (PDF, PS, DVI, or what have you). As a happy co-incidence, it happens that the intermediate formatting tree -- like most structured information -- can be serialised as an XML document. That means that, if you wish, the two parts of the process (building the device-independent formatting tree and rendering the tree) can be handled by separate programs, since the XML provides a common interchange standard. If you plan to do the whole thing with a single process, however, then there is no need actually to produce the XML representation of the formatting tree -- just keep it as an internal object tree. Now, HTML is a special case, because it does not fit in well with normal formatting semantics (it is considered bad practice to specify font size, etc., in the document, though you can attach a CSS stylesheet). I hope this helps. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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