Transformation output (was Re: XT and HTML conversion)

At 06:13 PM 2/27/99 -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
>The XSL specification does not deal with the
>generation of text streams: XML or otherwise. Therefore there is no
>normative stream "output". The only normative output is a tree. 
>
>You could serialize that tree as XML, Lisp S-expressions or English prose.
>Of course XML is most often the most useful.

This fits in well with the current discussion about providing norms for
that output and with your own proposal to separate the tree construction
from the FO's.  If we were to separate those things, how would you want to
specify that output?

1. Just a tree, period.
2. The XML representation of that tree.
3. Anything at all, roughly specified by the result-ns namespace and
depending on application support for implementation.
4. Just a tree, with a supporting spec describing how that tree could be
serialized.

English prose is another option, of course, though not very internationalized.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (April)
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http://www.simonstl.com


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