RE: [xsl] Combining HTML/FO StyleSheets (Indirection/Abstraction Methods) - Non-Trivial

[Joshua dot Kuswadi at BTFinancialgroup dot com]

Peter wrote:
> 	I have developing some XSLT files to translate an XML 
> document to HTML
> and then moved onto creating XSL:FO translation of the same 
> document. I
> noticed the bulk of the complex operations are the same or 
> very similar
> for both style sheets and in order to avoid inconsistances I like to
> merge the two sheets.
> 
> 	Are there guidelines anywhere on developing such merged sheets?
> 
> 	After slaving way at the problem I'll discuss below and 
> coming up with
> several non-working solutions, I was wondering "Do people create
> intermediate markup languages to ease the generation of both HTML and
> FO?" By this I mean do people generate and intermediate format (XML)
> which has all of the complex processing completed, and then have
> trivial conversion style sheets from that format to HTML or XSL:FO as
> appropriate? ((Example: intermediate tag like <paragraph> -> <p> or
> <fo:block> depending on the desired output format))

Hi Peter,

We've built a web site that will generate the data in XML and then present financial reports to the web client as either HTML, CSV(text) or PDF (converted from XSL-FO). In addressing the same issue, we have three different stylesheets, one for each desired output. As you can appreciate, some display logic is common, particularly between the HTML and XSL-FO version. 

Let's say I have report_html.xsl, report_fo.xsl and report_csv.xsl. One partial solution I developed was to write a stylesheet that transformed the report_html.xsl into report_fo.xsl. However, this was only a partial solution because I still needed to tweak the individual files as HTML doesn't require <fo:table-column> elements.

With hindsight, one thing I would have changed is writing the report_fo.xsl first as this is more detailed, and then writing the stylesheet to transform it to report_html.xsl. In one sense, this is using XSL-FO as the intermediary format you mentioned. With the XSL-FO you can either generate the PDF, or generate the HTML.

I'm sure other people will know of stylesheets that are already written to transform XSL-FO to HTML.

Hope that helps and good luck,
Joshua

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