Re: New Transformations in Yelp

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 11:29:01PM -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-10-13 at 21:23, Alexander Kirillov wrote:
> > 2. Why create new rather than fix old? (Oh, I don't doubt there are very
> > good reasons - most likely you can get a huge speedup - but I'm
> > curious...)
> 
> Huge speedup is right.  Up to 25x as fast for some documents.  Also, the
> new stylesheets are just easier to work with and easier to maintain, for
> my purposes.  Norm's stylesheets are huge and can do almost anything. 
> And that's great, but it just doesn't work well for Yelp.  There are
> many inherant speed problems, and there are design conflicts with Yelp's
> chunking needs that cause more speed problems because of the way Yelp
> has to work around them.

 Okay, one of the problem of Norm's stylesheets [1] in the past is that
they do not define a stable API. For example if you override a template or 
page breaking algorithm it did happen in the past that changes in names
or functionalities broke some of our stylesheet and so far they didn't
spent the time detailing what's really the public API of those stylesheets.

 One of the lessons is that once Shaun has a frozen first version of 
its XSLT it should be annotated to indicate what are the "public" entry
points. Then if needed the stylesheet themselves could be XSLT processed
to document that API for those interested in customizing the new output
in a relibale way,

Daniel

[1] though Norman Walsh coded the bulk of the stylesheets they are maintained
    collectively by a group of users on the docbook-apps mailing-list.

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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