Re: XSLT and Text Processing Languages

Here's my two cents worth,

When writing XML to XML transformations, I tend to use OmniMark more
then XSLT for two reasons:

1) I am almost always dealing with large documents.
2) XSLT does not allow you to output anything to the document prolog
aside from the doctype statement, and our XML processes expect entity
declarations for the graphics to be defined there. 

If XSLT scaled better and supported outputting entities and the like, I
would probably start using it more as a general transformation and data
extraction tool, probably not as a replacement for OmniMark, since a lot
of my transformation target formats are not XML-based, but as a kind of
"markup glue" it that makes sense. Until that time, I can't use it for
much more than HTML generation. 

Just an FYI, the soon to be released OmniMark 6 will support well-formed
XML (i.e. it does away with the DTD requirement). OmniMark Developer's
Network members will also have access to sophisticated namespace and XDR
schema processing libraries (and W3C schmema, once it is finalized). 

Rick Geimer
National Semiconductor
rick.geimer@xxxxxxx

Brand_Niemann@xxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> I am evaluating XSL based on this mailing list and Michael Kay's book.  I've
> used Omnimark for a number of data conversion projects (conversion from xml to
> html etc) and have found it to be relatively easy to learn. Other advantages of
> Omnimark are conversion of very large files, referent processing, validation of
> dtd/xml and more.
> 
>  So my question is the following: Does anyone have any feedback of when and
> where they would recommend using XSL/T, instead of Omnimark or any other text
> processing language?
> 
> In addition(as I understand), when used for displaying data to a browser, XSL/T
> processing is done either as a conversion process that is completed before the
> data is displayed (to HTML) or is raw XML processing that done during run time
> when the data is loaded in the browser (as is the case with IE5 MSXML).
> 
> My Question is, since other text processing languages like Omnimark are
> available, are most of the advantages of XSL/T processing realized when using
> XSL/T in connection with the browser at load time.  And if this is the case, is
> Microsoft's MSXML the answer?
> 
> Brand Niemann
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


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