RE: disable-output-escaping

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Subject: RE: disable-output-escaping
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2001 11:08:41 -0500

At 06:29 PM 11/30/01, Mike wrote:

The real reasons are (a) that if you mix metaphors by generating part-tree
and part-sequential-file, then your transformations are never going to be
composable and reusable, and (b) that you'll never learn the power of the
language if you start out by misusing it this way.

To reiterate and emphasize what Mike says, these two reasons for avoiding disable-output-escaping are deeply entangled with one another. Writing your markup as literals using d-o-e treats markup as if it were text, thereby breaking the basic paradigm of the structured markup approach to text processing, which is the source of its strength (as well as, occasionally, its Achilles' heel): the distinction between text (data) and markup as (despite appearances) fundamentally two different things.

It is significant that people most often try the d-o-e approach when they are either (1) still naive about the way XSLT works, and projecting mistaken expectations onto it (see Mike's (b)), or (2) trying to build an application whose concept or design is already threatening the markup/text distinction, such as handling ill-formed HTML markup wrapped in XML, or trying to do "metamarkup" in some way (marking up markup). (1) is curable, and (2) may sometimes be defensible, but it's often difficult to sort out where a given developer is, and you might be guilty of both.

A third case such as Rick Geimer's writing the internal declaration subset is the exception that proves the rule. Here, we'd like to write the output as markup, but since XSLT doesn't give us facilities to manage and output declarations as markup (strictly the DOCTYPE declaration with its contents ought to be markup), one has no choice but to fall back on pretending it's text.

Cheers,
Wendell


======================================================================
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
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  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================

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

Current Thread
RE: disable-output-escaping Wendell Piez - Mon, 3 Dec 2001 11:25:14 -0500 (EST) <= Mike Brown - Mon, 3 Dec 2001 19:42:29 -0500 (EST) Wendell Piez - Tue, 4 Dec 2001 14:29:49 -0500 (EST) <Possible follow-ups> Joerg Pietschmann - Fri, 7 Dec 2001 08:45:19 -0500 (EST)

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Re: Creating a node from a va, Thomas B. Passin	Thread	Re: disable-output-escaping, Mike Brown
Creating a node from a variab, Alessio Mazzieri	Date	Re: Mulberry processor-versi, Wendell Piez
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