Re: XSLT w/ PHP, ASP, JSP Processing Instructions

Michael B Allen wrote:

> But I'm a little worried because Saxon complains that the two templates
> are ambiguous. I guess node() also selects PIs? Is there a way to excplide
> 'php' PIs from The Identity Transform?

Just add priority="10" to the template that process PHP PI.

> But the missing '?' causes the script (PHP at least) to fail. If we
> use the xml output method to subvert the no trailing '?' requirement,
> all PIs still must not contain '>' or '<'. Even if it were practical
> to use entity references for these characters (which it's not), PHP
> will generate a parse error on them. Also XHTML does not have <?xml
> version="1.0"?> at the top AFAIK.
>
> Can someone recommend a robust, compliant method for transforming XML
> to HTML or XHTML with PHP compatible processing instructions? Surely
> the XSLT founding fathers must have considered this use-case.

The problem here is that XSLT was designed to output XML, HTML or plain
text. Scripting languages like PHP or ASP were not designed in a way
that is compatible neither with HTML, nor with XML. Output of PHP/ASP
can be of course well-formed, but source of script doesn't guarantee
this. For example in PHP you can have:

<input name="age" value="<?php echo $age?>">

It is not legal to have '<' character inside attribute value in XML/HTML.

This and many other reasons cause that PHP/ASP doesn't play very well
with XML if you want to treat *source* of script as an XML document (PHP
is still much better in this then ASP with <%).

When fathers of XSLT designed XSLT (during 1997-99), there was PHP/FI
(2.0) in use AFAIK, and this version of language used SGML friendly
<?...> separators. <?...?> notation was added in PHP3, but anyway PHP
was not so popular at that time as it is in recent years.

I think that best what you can do is to output PHP/ASP markup with
d-o-e. Something like:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;?php </xsl:text>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">...PHP code goes here...</xsl:text>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">?></xsl:text>

You can define internal text entites for the first and the last xsl:text
to save typing in XSLT code.

Some web scripting languages (e.g. JSP since 1.2) started to offer
alternative XML-based syntax in recent years. But there is no such thing
for PHP or ASP AFAIK.

				Jirka

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