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Re: xml-stylesheet p.i. and other options


> I think the point was for it to be a vehicle for data interchange, upon which 
> things like web applications can be built. 

ah, that of course is the fundamental difference. I still really believe
that documents are things scribbled on papyrus that you can read in bed,
I think data is useful, but dull.

> Of course it is, but if you've said in your Docbook XML that if I want to
> style it, I've got to use stylesheet 'my-custom-docbook-to-html4.xsl' with it,
> then that doesn't do me any good if I needed XSLFO, does it?

It doesn't do you any harm either. You have the document source to do
what you wish with. The alternatives would have been to transform on the
server and ship HTML, in which case you'd have no chance of getting
to reasonable FO, or just shipping the XML with no indication of any
default presentation which is fine if the receiving client knows it's
docbook but a general XML browser will just barf or show something like
IE's folding XML tree display. I don't see either of those alternatives
as an improvement in the general case.

> then you hopefully aren't expecting that yourDoc will
> always be processed with that stylesheet.

It will be processed by any application that supports the stylesheet pi REC.
The application will also need to support XML (and HTML for display)
and several other needed layers. I don't see any reason to single out
the stylesheet.

me> If they are server side solutions then aren't they shipping html rather
me> than XML?

> Why assume that? I've worked on applications that dealt with 6 kinds of XML
> in, 2 kinds of XML (for different automated recipients)

yes, so have I  and I don't use the stylesheet PI then, or at least I
only expect it to do one transform, a default presentation for humans, so
you can look at the xml file in IE or Netscape or Mozilla.


You want the server to make decisions about what the client needs. I see
XML as a way of explictly avoiding that. I can send XML to a client
along with a stylesheet that ensures a default presentation of the
document, but the client has the document XML not just a dumbed-down
HTML+gif rendering. If it's MathMl you can for example cut out the
mathematics and drop it into a computer algebra system. The client
might not like printing via HTML and re-style the entire thing to FO or
TeX. At the server end I don't want to second guess what the client is
going to do with the document, I just want to make sure that (especially
human readers) get some indication what the document is supposed to look
like.

David

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