RE: xsl:sort in old MSXML

Wendell,

I understand your concept. I agree on the Descriptive issue. 

I don't get the Procedural one. In your msg you've said "write XML at home and convert it into HTML". I think from this excerpt that you mean that instructions can be kept and run inside an XML file. I still don't get how. I only associate the process to de XSL language, providing an HTML output.

This is why I asked David to let me know where on earth I can find a conceptual model of the whole architecture.

It still puzzels me how the data-process-presentation three tiered layout is kept with all this tools/languages/transformations/schemas.

Claudio.

-----Original Message-----
From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Martes, 01 de Julio de 2003 04:28 p.m.
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE:  xsl:sort in old MSXML


Claudio,

I'm not (at all) sure I understand the question.

If you mean "descriptive" markup vs. "procedural" markup ... XML can be 
used for either, though it's particularly well-suited to the latter. In the 
use case I'm describing, your XML would likely be "descriptive" hence 
"represent[ing] data, not instructions". Maintain your data in XML, use 
HTML to publish it. Nothing radical there at all.

How do you take it I was comparing XML with HTML? What I was describing was 
an architecture for a publishing system that takes advantage of XML but 
requires neither client-side, nor dynamic server-side processing to get 
from XML into HTML  or other formats such as PDF. In return for accepting 
some limitations (e.g. user-configured rendering), you get quite a bit of 
freedom in this model.

Probably that doesn't clarify, so if you could rephrase what you don't 
understand in what I said, I'd be grateful. :->

Cheers,
Wendell

At 12:55 PM 7/1/2003, you wrote:
>Wendell,
>
>I thought the XML as a way to represent data, not instructions. Why you 
>compare with HTML?
>
>Claudio.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
>Sent: Martes, 01 de Julio de 2003 12:58 p.m.
>To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Re:  xsl:sort in old MSXML
>
>
>Claudio,
>
>At 09:18 AM 7/1/2003, David wrote:
> > > I don't have access to a server (I did some applications in a free
> > > site hosting), the transformations aren't done in this case in the
> > > client side?
> >
> >If you don't have access to either a sever or a client that can do XSLT
> >then you can't use XSLT, you have to just write HTML.
>
>You can still, however, write XML at home and convert it into HTML in batch
>mode, then serve up the HTML the old-fashioned way.
>
>"Poor man's XML". Yet a surprisingly effective way to use it -- you still
>get many or most of the advantages of XML: you can tag your documents to
>their type instead of maintaining the HTML tagging, which is useless for
>anything but web pages. Assuming you do the design right, you'll still get
>XML's economies of scale (from the "separation of format from content" etc.
>etc.), robustness and reusability of your data, and all that. (Whether this
>would be worthwhile in your particular case, of course, depends on why
>you're using XML.)
>
>It's the application of markup language technologies in back offices like
>this, invisible to the world, that led Chet Ensign to title a book "SGML:
>the Billion-Dollar Secret".


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
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