RE: Leventhal's challenge misses the point

HI Guy,

Guy said:
In terms of allowing factoring within XSL, I think persuits to date have
been influenced by procedural thinking. I understand that we can now use
named templates as macros, and this is a good thing. What I would also like
to see is a mechanism for defining FOs out of existsing FOs. This would take
some of the preasure off the XSL-WG on getting it "right" first time, and
allow observation of FO usage for incorporation into future versions of XSL.
[...demonstration...]

Didier says:
I agree with you 100% guy on this topic.
In fact, we already experimented this feature with DSSSL and discovered that
this is a powerful feature. In DSSSL you can define a new FO because a FO is
a procedure. So, for example, Tony Graham created a library of HTML FOs.
Originally, we had to within a rule "make" the desired FO with James'
extensions like below:

(element body
	(make gi: "DIV"
		attribute: etc...
	)
)

Tony's library creates new FO, in that case a new "DIV" Fo so that the
"make" is transformed into:

(element body
	(make div
		css-style:"etc..."
	)
)

The "div" Fo didn't existed in the original DSSSL list of FOs. All new Fos
are contained in an external library and could be re-used in different
projects. So, teo elements are useful: a) the capacity to encapsulate code
in re-usable libraries, b) the ability to create new Fos.

So indeed, what you are suggesting is quite powerful and we experimented
with concrete application the usefulness of such feature.

For more references see the following article:
http://www.netfolder.com/SGML/HTML%20Sample.html

regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.netfolder.com


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