RE: XML to HTML Conversion Tools

Kurt,
Typically the behavior of web servers can be extended in two ways:
Filter - receive & process each & every web transaction (kind of like
subclassing)
Extension - take over a sub-tree of the URL namespace

Different web servers have different ways of doing these. There are some
nice, fairly standard ways of doing an extension - specifically Java
Servlets. I don't know if there are standard ways of doing filters.

If performance or scalability become a concern, you will probably get into a
caching scheme at some point. Using existing technology (caching proxies,
etc.) is probably a good idea, and so you may want to check into how they
work & consider that in your design.

Also, you might want to think about a more flexible way of returning HTML
when the client asks for XML. The HTTP protocol has a mechanism for the
client to specify its preferred media format. You might want to check the
'Accept' header & look for 'text/xml' or 'text/html' and return the
appropriate type. This way, a client could get to the XML by specifying
'text/xml' if that is what it really wanted.

Mike D
DataChannel

PS, 
If you are considering Java based server side XSL processing, DataChannel
has an XSL processor that you can evaluate:
http://www.datachannel.com/xml_resources/

-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Donath [mailto:kurt.donath@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 7:34 AM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: XML to HTML Conversion Tools



I'm part of a team looking for feedback on tools that convert XML to
HTML at the server.  We want to be able to tell the server that any file
with .xml should be converted and returned as HTML.  The tool should be
able to use XSL as part of the conversion.  We've used DocProc - which
seems to work well - and we're trying to figure out what other options
there are.  Any feedback on what people are using or where to goto find
out more information would be appreciated.


-- 
Kurt Donath
315.456.6276
Staff Systems Engineer
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                       Lockheed Martin - Enterprise Information Systems
                                          Systems Engineering / Webserv


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