How to put msxml to immediate use

Andrew Bunner (bunner@massquantities.com)
Thu, 03 Sep 1998 10:49:51 -0700


If you're a web author, you've probably already played with msxsl and
seen some neat possibilities. One thing that prevents msxsl from being a
being a valuable tool is the fact that it doesn't expand ENTITY references.

It's my belief that anyone with a Java development environment could fix
this in an hour (or less).

Wouldn't it be handy to do something like this...

jview msxml -d lots_of_entities.xml > temp.xml
msxls -i temp.xml -s style.xsl -o final_output.html

If anyone with VJ++ (or something like it) wants to do the web authoring
community a favor, change the way msxml behaves to print the entity itself
rather than the reference when it's run with the -d option.

Very brief example...

-ExternalDTD.xml-
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE body SYSTEM "ExternalDTD.dtd" >
<body>
<greeting>This is a &foo; &bar; </greeting>
</body>

-EternalDTD.dtd-
<!ELEMENT body (greeting)>
<!ENTITY foo 'bar'>
<!ENTITY big SYSTEM 'bar.xml'>
<!ELEMENT greeting (#PCDATA) >

-bar.xml-
Hello World!

Would anyone be willing to modify msxml to output...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE body SYSTEM "ExternalDTD.dtd" >
<body>
<greeting>This is a bar Hello World! </greeting>
</body>

...instead of...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE body SYSTEM "ExternalDTD.dtd" >
<body>
<greeting>This is a &foo; &bar; </greeting>
</body>

...which it does now?

I've done my reading and researched this and I haven't found any set of
tools that will take map (.xml, .xsl) -> .html

Any help, thoughts or .class files would be greatly appreciated ;)

-- Andrew

Andrew Bunner
President, Founder Mass Quantities, Inc.
Professional Supplements for the Perfect Physique
http://www.massquantities.com