Re: XML slice design

Sydney wrote:
> I need some help on XML design and XSL.

Your structure puzzles me. To me, the strength of XML is its
representation of heirachical structured data, yet your example still
seems to be thinking of your pages as a stream...

Unless I'm missing something here, (such as what do you mean by the word
'slice') I would see what you're trying to do to be better modelled as
follows...

 
<div type="chapter">
 <p>?</p>
 <div type="part">

  <slice>
   <p>?</p>
   <note>?</note>
   <list><item>?</item></list>
  </slice>

  <slice>
   <qa>?</qa>
  </slice>

 </div>
 <div type="part">

  <slice>
   <p>?</p>
   <note>?</note>
  </slice>

 </div>
</div>

Your comments said "<!?End of my first slice-->". That explicitly
implies there was a beginning to it, so mark that too!

Do NOT 'delimit', encapsulate and 'chunk'.

That said, I still don't see what you are adding to the document by
breaking it apart this way. (the divs could do this job on their own)
I guess that 'slice' is a construct of your own and independant of the
actual content structure.
If you want to slice the text for formatting purposes omly... um...
don't. I'm sure there's some clever alternative using only XSL that
means that layout issues don't pollute your information structure.

Yes it may seem tricky to get page breaks or columns into HTML without
using tags like this, but there should be a graceful way around it.
Reformulate your data structure a bit.

.dan.

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