[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: `High-level' format specifications with XSL?
>>>>> Paul Grosso <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > I probably worded things poorly above. The key point I was trying > to make is that XML by itself has no presentational semantics, and > the point of a stylesheet is precisely to allow the association of > presentation (and perhaps other) semantics with arbitrary XML. So > saying you want a stylesheet language that doesn't require you to > specify presentational semantics is an oxymoron. I know that. What I wanted to get at is that it is possible to specify presentational semantics on different levels of abstraction. At the lowest level of abstraction you would have to say `put a green pixel here and a red one there' (this is also known as raster graphics, I guess). At a somewhat higher level of abstraction you would say `put a Times Roman ten point upright A here and a Times Roman ten point upright b there.' That's what you do in a DVI file (as produced by TeX). At a still higher level, you say `put a Times Roman ten point paragraph here, left justified with a left margin of 3pt and a right margin of 5pt on a 42pt line width and a line spacing of ...' You get the idea. This is what you do in XML (stylesheet part thereof), it seems. At a *still* higher level, you say `put a section heading here'. This is the level I'd like to use. > If by "Web browser" you mean something that has built-in > processing for the HTML tag set, then you aren't really wanting a > stylesheet language. You want some way to map your XML into > HTML--perhaps augmented by CSS and/or some script--that the > browser will handle. Well, I hope I mentioned XSL in my original post without specifying whether I wanted the stylesheet part or the transformational part... Anyway, at the time I wrote that I didn't really know that this distinction from DSSSL carried over to XSL, too. Yes, it seems I want to transform XML to HTML. > And it just so happens that the transformation capabilities of XSL > may be able to help here. Good. But just how would it do that? Remember that I'm currently using xslj (by Henry or Harry Thomson, the thing that converts XSL to extended DSSSL for processing with jade). How would I write a foo.xsl file which causes xslj to produce a foo.dsl file which in turn causes jade to transform XSL to HTML? I think I tried the obvious (to me) approach: I wrote rules like the following: ,----- | <rule> | <target-element type="projecttitle"> | </target-element> | <H1> | <children/> | </H1> | </rule> `----- This didn't work, though. It produced errors like this: ,----- | xslj:project.xsl:29:7:E: element "H1" undefined | xslj:project.xsl:29:4:W: unknown flow-object spec or macro | xslj:project.xsl:35:8:E: end tag for "rule" which is not finished `----- Now, I know that I must've done something very stupid. But what was it? How can I use XSL (xslj) to do XML-to-HTML conversions? >>>>> Kai wrote: > One additional aspect that comes to mind for on-screen presentation is > that different users like different fonts in their Web browsers. I > don't want to make them use the fonts I like, I want them to be able > to choose theirs. And I want to make them be able to choose whether > they like their headings green or blue or bold or italic or underlined > or ... you get the idea. And I want the users to be able to choose > their spacing, too! And the justification of the text, and so on. >>>>> Paul replies: > I'm not sure where "the users" come into your scenario. Are they > producing the XML, writing style or transformation specs, viewing > the results in a browser, or all of the above? How is it that you > expect the users to choose fonts and spacing and so on? I wrote project-foo.xml, project.xsl and produced project.dsl (with xslj from project.xsl) and project-foo.html (with jade from project.dsl and project-foo.xml). The `users' are the people looking at project-foo.html with a Web browser (Netscape, say). These people can choose fonts and spacing by choosing a Web browser. Lynx produces strikingly different output than Netscape and Mosaic, for instance. Also, Netscape allows you to select a font (type and size). (Don't know about spacing, though.) > In this transformation mode, what you end up seeing in a browser > has almost nothing to do with the "capabilities" of XSL, since the > XSL transformation spec is just specifying an arbitrary > transformation process. If you don't like what you see as a > result, that is due either to the fact that the specified > transformation isn't generating what is necessary or the browser > isn't displaying it as you hoped. Well, I wanted to generate the following: ,----- | <HTML><BODY> | <H1>Project Foo</H1> | <P>...with a really short description.</P> | </BODY></HTML> `----- But I couldn't generate this using xslj because it wouldn't let me specify the H1 tag in the output. Please note: in the above I have used very simple-minded examples, married very strictly to the HTML 1.0 tag set and the semantics of that as implemented by the initial versions of Mosaic and Netscape. Please don't let that lead you into thinking that I am that simple-minded. I recognize that the HTML 1.0 tag set isn't the is-all and be-all of formatting output for on-screen presentation. Instead, what I am trying to say is that there are different levels of abstraction which one can use to specify one's output. And I want to use a level of abstraction which is higher than the one provided by XSL-with-HTML-flow-objects (as I understand it). I don't want to specify things like whether headings should be bold or underlined. I want to specify I want a heading, and what a heading looks like should be defined by someone else. In the case of HTML 1.0 that someone else is the implementor of the HTML viewer (or Web browser, or whatever). In the case of LaTeX, that someone else is the implementor of the .sty or .cls file. I do think, however, that it would be convenient if I could just use the HTML tag set, as there are already some very popular programs which do nicely looking on-screen presentation of these documents, and user-configurable, too! (Remember that Preferences dialog?) I want it tomorrow. kai -- You ate somebody? -- Just a leg. -- That's terrible! -- Not with mustard. (Terry Pratchett: Interesting Times) XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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