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

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* Gregory Leblanc (GLeblanc cu-portland edu) wrote at 22:44 on 28/11/00:
> > -----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.

What is Cocoon?

gnome-db2html2 is a bad hack compared to XML and XSL.

Also - some of the difficult things we do in C (gnome-db2html2) looks like
they can be more easily done in XSLT (especially since we use the SAX API (and
not DOM))

> > 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.

db2html is too slow. I am talking about "run-time" transformation (we won't
know until we get decent tools for it).
 
> > 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.

ScrollKeeper may one day be more "server-oriented" (i.e. it "serves" you the
files that you ask for). Actually it may or may not do that. If it doesn't do
that, then it would be trivial for a help browser to apply the XSL stylesheet
to the XML doc (actually - you don't even need to! you just define the
stylesheet at the top of the XML doc).

Regards,
Ali