RE: Cascading. ( Re: Recursive Template Application )

On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen wrote:

> > what a browser is meant to do: picks up the transformations from the
> > originating document via the <?xml-stylesheet?> processing
> > instructions. I'm sorry if I confused things by using your
> > "cat" command. I should have said its more like:
> > 
> > "process some.xml"
> > 
> > Where the process command picks out the stylesheets to use.
> 
> Even so, I am a little bit puzzled.  For an XML file to be truly
> generic and capable of multiple, independent conversions, the
> conversion should not be specified in the document itself but
> somewhere else.  This is exactly the same problem that Cocoon version
> 1 suffers from...

I realise this. There's a conflict though between providing something that
sticks to known standards and that you can deliver unchanged to a
browser, and something that works for thousands of XML files where you
don't want to manually change the PI's in all the documents to change the
stylesheets.

> A problem is that there is too little information embedded in the
> filename and the MIME-type for any processing pathway to be inferred,
> as such.  Would it be possible to make an extension mechanism allowing
> a document to provide keywords to its content, and then say: apply A,
> B and C to the document to get the desired result?

I could have sworn though that I said AxKit was capable of this. When I
designed AxKit I took into account all of Cocoon 1's flaws (at least what
I saw as the flaws) and created a truly extensible XML application server
that you can make work _your_ way. If you want to use embedded
<?xml-stylesheet?> PI's (which I personally quite like for a small web
site), then do so. If you don't want to do it that way, then don't. Pick
some other way to do it (of course implementing that different way is up
to you - unless its the default alternate way that AxKit works).

-- 
<Matt/>

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list