Re: Generating SVG

Chris Lilley:
> I'm not convinced that XSL is a good way to convert something else into
> SVG; and I have seen some evidence that it is not.

James Clark:
>Can you expand on this?  It is the sort of thing I would hope to be able
>to do in XSL.  The current XSL draft is missing many features that I
>would expect to see in XSL eventually.  Is it just a matter of XSL
>lacking some features (such as support for arithmetic and other numeric
>operations) or is it something more fundamental that this?

I too would like to be able to do this in XSL. But my concern is that you
would in effect have to write a formatting engine into your XSL stylesheet.

SVG seems to me to be closer to the (more concrete) PDF/PS end of the
formatting spectrum than the (more abstract) Flow Object end.

It seems much harder to take an XML document representing an org chart and
transform it to SVG using XSL than taking an XML document representing a
report and transforming it to FOs or HTML. In the former, the stylesheet
would have to do all of the layout whereas in the latter, many of the layout
decisions are left up to the formatter at the back end.

James
--
James Tauber / jtauber@xxxxxxxxxxx / www.jtauber.com
Associate Researcher, Electronic Commerce Network
Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia

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