RE: Can XSLT help with overlapping structures (was: XML slic

Linda van den Brink writes:
 > Of couse, Sydney could have a wrong reason for wanting to do this, but there
 > can be valid cases where one wants to do this. Someone could be transcribing
 > an edition of a (old) text and want to markup the page break structure as
 > well as the chapter/paragraph structure. 

yes, we are singing from the same songbook, honest.

 > A document can have two (or more) structures and it's difficult to represent
 > this in SGML/XML.

agreed, its an old chestnut, but the TEI solution (chapter 14 of the
guidelines, in great detail) is not bad.

 >  It's interesting to see if XSLT can deal with this. What's
 > the best way to represent multiple structures in XML so that XSLT can work
 > with those structures? 

I don't see much chance any new ways being proposed. the question is how to
process eg TEI <anchor> elements using XSLT. but look, XSLT is about
transformation, no more no less. So since *HTML* has no concept of
overlapping structures, the task is doomed to failure, no?

Perhaps XSLT could be persuaded to look at all the text nodes between
page breaks, and act on each one individually. but its
hard. *anything* (like an <emph>) might be split across pages.

i agree, its a very interesting topic...

sebastian


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list