RE: efficient filtering of XML files. ( XML!=content && XSLT!=presentation )?

["Pawson, David" <DPawson at rnib dot org dot uk>]

 Mike Brown 
<big snip/>
>xsl:apply-templates can be very powerful when used to process, for
>example, a source tree consisting of a purely structural 
>description of a
>web site, and secondary source trees (retrieved via 
>document()) consisting
>of presentational variables (colors, text styles, image names and
>attributes) referenced by the structural tree.

This made me think. My primary use of XSLT is producing multiple
media from a single XML master document.

One of the things I do is ask users not to put 'titles' into the source
content, saying I can add this at transformation time.

This means I prefix the contents of <attendees> with
'ATTENDEES: '

I.e. I put content into the stylesheet. This also means I need to duplicate
this for all media, which is potentially error prone due to typos.

Mike, are you advocating something along the lines of a function
which retrieves, from an external source, an appropriate 'styling' for
the current node? Something like a function get-style(.) which returns,
in your example, say, a colour, in mine, some heading text?

For example, given a location such as minutes/rearmatter/attendees
I am returned the string ATTENDEES.

Then I could have all my 'fixed content' in a seperate file and make use
of it in all appropriate media, perhaps even differentiating the media
with a different parameter, so that I receive back 'formatted' strings
appropriate to \tex, html, braille etc.

Definately worth exploring. Thanks Mike.

Regards, DaveP


 


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