Re: [ANN] Kludgey workarounds for IE and Netscape

Andy Dent (dent@highway1.com.au)
Thu, 10 Sep 1998 22:16:39 +0800

At 7:31 PM +0800 10/9/98, James Clark wrote:
>An XSL processor can do other things with the result tree than just
>write it out as XML.
>
>If you want to use XSL to produce some non-XML format, first you need to
>devise an XML representation of it.
Why?

Why can't a product like our report-writer take
- XML describing content
- XSL specifying layout
and produce, for example, a report preview window on a Mac?
After all, if you regard a browser, it's doing something very similar.

I don't see the need for the intermediate translation to another set of XML
data, but there may be something I've missed in the XSL processing standard.

I agree that a clean design mandates some separate structured collections
of objects between XML and output, but I don't see how they are necessarily
either XML or anything closely related. For one thing, they are 'highly
decorated' by comparison with the original XML.
Andy Dent BSc MACS AACM, Software Designer, A.D. Software, Western Australia
OOFILE - Database, Reports, Graphs, GUI for c++ on Mac, Unix & Windows
PP2MFC - PowerPlant->MFC portability
http://www.highway1.com.au/adsoftware/crossplatform.html