[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSL controversy
Sean Mc Grath <digitome@xxxxxx> wrote: >I guess I should not have mentioned JavaScript as it has confused >matters. Most of the work is in the recursive algorithm for generating >interlinked HTML pages to fake the appearance of a collapsible table >of contents. My head hurts thinking about how this could be done in XSL. It so happens that we are solving almost the same (sub) problem using XSL/HTML/JavaScript; we have a database containing a large number of records with a hierarchical structure and we'd like to display this as a collapsible tree. In our case the solution was to have the XSLT generate an HTML page which contained (references to) fixed JavaScript which accessed the database via an embedded Java applet and inserted elements dynamically into the HTML DOM - based on HTML "template" fragments produced by the XSLT for the purpose. There are advantages to each part of the system - we can change the formatting of the tree using XSLT, the way we access the database using Java, the event handling using JavaScript - and the whole thing displays in a browser. You could say this is exactly the headache you mentioned - but trying to write this system in any single language would have been far worse. Using just JavaScript is ludicrous. Using just Java is possible - but you'd still need some JavaScript to tie it to the browser's event model and specifying the tree transformations would be a nightmare. Our system turned out to be quite elegant, in fact - the only messy part is the JavaScript which like other weakly-typed "anything goes" scripting languages has a tendency to get out of control when it gets too large. Now, if browsers used JPython as their preferred scripting languages... but I digress. To the point, XSLT is not intended for specifying event handlers, or database operations (except using XPath for certain form of queries). It is great for specifying tree to tree conversions - which is what we are using it for, with good results. Attacking XSLT because you can't write a full system using it doesn't make much sense. Share & Enjoy, Oren Ben-Kiki XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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