RE: Style Matters - A class act

["Didier PH Martin" <martind at netfolder dot com>]

Hi David,

David said:
I'm of the opinion that a more general solution is the creation of a
set of Xlink elements during transformation. This set of links captures
exactly which nodes of the source document(s) influenced the creation of
exactly which nodes in the result. Ideally, I think this link document would
be a separate document from the source and result documents. Ideally, this
link document would be produced automatically by the XSL engine, via command
line switch or input parameter, because it is far easier for the engine to
do than for the stylesheet writer to do. Whenever the engine is about to
emit a result tree node, emit a link to the link fork/document/database
which specifies the context nodes from the source and the result nodes being
emitted.
	This will work between any XML sources and any XLinkable result. In
particular, a direct manipulation GUI needs to drill down through the
presentation layer to the semantic content over and over, traversing these
links to get at individual characters of content at times. In such usage
scenarios, industrial strength linking between source and result is a
necessity.

	I hope my suggestion of automatic link output is taken seriously by
XSLT engine authors. Even as a debugging tool, it would be valuable.

Didier replies:
In fact, when I wrote the article I got two things in mind:
a) debugging (as you mentionned)
b) the usage of templates (I am not taking here of XSLT templates but more
template as used by products like red dots, NCompass, GoLive, etc...)

In both cases, it is useful to have a back linkage from the result of the
transformation(i.e. rendition language) ito the original model (i.e. XML
document).

I agree, my suggestion to use the "class" attribute cannot be adapted to a
template matched to an attribute. Therefore, the usage of xlink is more
powerful since we can practically address any node. This is a very good
suggestion David. I'll keep it in my notebook.

Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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