RE: XSL/XSLT (was Re: A thought:)

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ali Abdin [mailto:aliabdin aucegypt edu]
> 
> For some more info on XSL and XML, I found this in the sample 
> chapter of the
> XML Bible:
> 
> There are three primary ways XML documents are transformed 
> into other formats,
> such as HTML, with an XSL style sheet:
> 
> 1) The XML document and associated style sheet are both 
> served to the client
> (Web browser), which then transforms the document as 
> specified by the style
> sheet and presents it to the user.

IE 5 is capable of this, although it's support is broken.

> 2) The server applies an XSL style sheet to an XML document 
> to transform it
> to some other format (generally HTML) and sends the 
> transformed document to
> the client (Web browser).

Cocoon and gnome-db2html2 are here.

> 3) A third program transforms the original XML document into 
> some other
> format (often HTML) before the document is placed on the 
> server. Both server
> and client only deal with the post-transform document.

db2html is here.

> But, we can elminiate the need for gnome-db2html2 entirely if 
> Mozilla supports
> XSL :) (we would now fall under approach #1)

Yep, definitely what we're looking forward too.  jrb wrote the beginnings of
gnome-db2html2 as a hack to see how hard it would be to do, not as any sort
of a final or lasting solution.  

> This also has ramifications for the ScrollKeeper project. For 
> DocBook XML
> documents it can just apply an XSL stylesheet and return HTML 
> for example
> (this if for the "server-side" part of ScrollKeeper) - that 
> would fall under
> #2 I think. This would be good for ScrollKeeper because it 
> wouldn't need to
> use some GNOME specific, semi-broken DocBook -> HTML 
> hack^H^H^H^Hconverter.

How does that have anything to do with Scrollkeeper?  That sounds like a
help-browser issue, not a metadata issue to me.
	Greg