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Re: XSL for non-XML input (Was: Re: XML Hangover)

• To: Pete Cordell <petexmldev@t...>
• Subject: Re: XSL for non-XML input (Was: Re: XML Hangover)
• From: Tony Lavinio <xml1@l...>
• Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 10:44:46 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <012f01c58784$9462c160$b700a8c0@RW>
• Organization: Stylus Studio
• References: <E1Ds4Wn-0006Xp-00@p...> <012f01c58784$9462c160$b700a8c0@RW>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

On 07-13-2005 4:25 AM, Pete Cordell wrote:
> Does that imply that XSL could be used on any hierarchical text based 
> data input with a suitable front end that can extract events that mirror 
> XML's elements and attributes etc?
>  
> Going further, observing the idea of using out of band data (e.g. 
> schema) to provide extra information to complete 'binary XML', could XSL 
> (with suitable front ends) work on say an ASN.1 encoded X.509 
> certificate (and ASN.1 message definition) and produce, say, a PDF output?
>  
> Not that I have a need to do that right now!  I'm just interested to 
> know whether XSL can be used as a kind of universal data translator.

It's possible in several ways:

1. Michael Kay has pointed out already that XSLT 2.0 includes
unparsed-text()

2. Brian Goetz wrote an article that showed how to use the JTidy
toolkit to run XQuery against HTML, by converting it on-the-fly
to XML.  This same idea could work with XSLT.
See http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp03225.html

3. It is already fairly common to output PDF files from XSLT
via post-processing.  This is what Apache's FOP and RenderX's XEP,
among others, already do very well.
See http://xml.apache.org/fop/ and http://www.renderx.com/tools/

4. Stylus Studio (disclaimer: our product) uses a similar idea to
provide a host of adapters for converting non-XML formats to or
from XML.  The very simplest let you run XSLT (1.0 or 2.0) or
XQuery against a comma-separated-value file, and the more complex
allow transparent operation against EDI files or relational
databases.
See http://www.stylusstudio.com/docs/v62/d_flatfileconversion10.html

I just gave a presentation on this very topic at one of our sister
division's annual conferences.  The entire presentation is at
http://www.stylusstudio.com/exchange/transforming.html - including
slides and audio.

-- 
Sincerely,
Tony Lavinio
Stylus Studio Principal Software Architect
http://www.stylusstudio.com/

• References:
  • XSL for non-XML input (Was: Re: XML Hangover)
    • From: "Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@t...>

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