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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSLT vs. CSS (Re: Indexing)
 David Carlisle wrote: >>That makes perfect sense if you are looking at the XML as a document >>with no semantic other than presentation. > > > Actually many of my documents contain mathematics that i hope doesn't > just have presentational semantics. Granted, in one sense. (I'd rather not get into a tit-for-tat on the meaning of the word semantics. ) > But I just really meant the point that you re-inforced: > > >>Placing simplifying constraints on the transforms seems to make it a >>plausible approach... > > > It's clearly possible, if you know what you are doing, to write specific > transforms for specific documents that have a reliable inverse mapping, > but the nature of XSLT makes it a highly unsuitable language for that > use. Well, I won't argue that, but leave that one for the XSLT engine developers out there. > You can't simply constrain the usage by restricting to a subset of > the language: the default behaviour of an XSLT stylesheet is to discard > all element markup and return a character string. If you are a tool developer and wish to utilize XSLT as an internal component, then you can indeed constrain the usage, as well as the run-time context. How to achieve that may be much less straightforward than with CSS. Isn't the default behavior to construct a result tree? If I were designing such a system, it would probably provide meaningful defaults, and a set of small, modular transforms rather than a single monolithic stylesheet. Having said that, I'm not currently designing such a system and on consideration I don't see any tools out there attempting to use XSLT in an interactive manner. What I see is XSLT used to construct editors' user interfaces, but this is probably not the mode of operation that you meant. Regards, Mitch > Since that presumably > isn't much use if you want to interact with the original document, > you'll need to specify constraints on the result having the right > properties rather than constraints on the way the XSLT is used. > That's a rather hard thing to enforce. I would have thought a system > designed for editing would have been better designed to use a language > that ensures that there is a well defined mapping back from the result > to the source. > David > > > ________________________________________________________________________ > This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star Internet. The > service is powered by MessageLabs. For more information on a proactive > anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit: > http://www.star.net.uk > ________________________________________________________________________ > 
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