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[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Swing-style Glue and Struts
 What you describe is, as you apparently suspect, very ambitious. It is perilously close to constraint-based, layout-driven formatting, which is still a ways out. For example, you're bound to find that "count[ing] lines within the template match block that were copied through" will be a bear. What's a "line"? Will it be a structure in your source (say a <line> element) you can count, or will you have to resort to other means to count them? Another problem you'll have is that HTML is *not* well-suited to support this design paradigm: you are bound to require many kluges, browser dependencies etc. if you try to get at all complex. (For example, you need to go to CSS ... still unevenly supported ... before you can get a notion of "vertical line spacing" in HTML.) Trying to teach a dog to dance, etc. (Now, *eventually* it is to be hoped that XSL-FO may do this kind of thing fairly gracefully. But not soon: let's get v.1 first. Some SVG people are beginning to make noises about constraint-based processing for their v.2. I hope they try it: it seems a natural place to take a first stab at the problem.) Now, this is not to say the task you describe is impossible, if (as you stipulate) your "layout manager" is rudimentary enough. Just don't try to get too ambitious: go one tiny step at a time. Just my impressions. I hope someone whose hands are deeper in the guts of the technologies is willing to weigh in. (I'm just a "user".) Cheers, Wendell At 10:03 AM 8/1/01, you wrote: In Java Swing, you can nudge components around within a GUI layout by adding Glue and Strut components. I would like to implement something similar using XSLT with my servlet's XML output, resulting in HTML table cells that incorporate a rudimentary layout manager... ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ====================================================================== XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list 
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