Re: An XSL SAX?

Chris Maden wrote
>Event-stream-based formatting is very difficult to work with....
>transforming between that model and a container-based model is very
>difficult without side-effects (which XSL eschews).

>The event model
>also means that you have to have the entire document up to the current
>point in order to correctly understand the formatting of the current
>object;
Not quite - you need the current cascaded formatting as adjusted along the
way. You don't need to have retained the entire document.

>I don't think it's
>a good one to standardize.
I'm not one to push single standards - my comments were purely in our
context 'what we need' of a report-writer which needs to save formatted
output and read it back in with the separation between layout and data
preserved.

In case anyone's wondering why you need to preserve the separation:
1) changing pagination requires reflowing reports according to the layout rules
2) in our application the user can edit part of the report context in the
preview window, thus causing reflows as paragraphs extend over pages etc.
Andy Dent BSc MACS AACM, Software Designer, A.D. Software, Western Australia
OOFILE - Database, Reports, Graphs, GUI for c++ on Mac, Unix & Windows
PP2MFC - PowerPlant->MFC portability
http://www.highway1.com.au/adsoftware/crossplatform.html
In SF for Macworld Jan 1st-9th 1999, at the AppMaker stand in DevDepot


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