xml-dev - Re: [ANN] Kludgey workarounds for IE and Netscape

[Andy Dent <dent@highway1.com.au>]

At 5:50 PM +0800 11/9/98, James Clark wrote:
>There needs to be a
>XML representation specified because an XSL stylesheet specifies its
>result as XML.
Umm, I'm not sure I can agree.

The XSL parsers that exist, and the standard, specify the result as XML.

As far as I can see there's nothing saying the output of XSL+XML can't be
an invisible set of c++ objects.

I'm not being wilfull, although possibly a little dense. I think part of my
problem comes from the fact that XSL as currently specified is not
sufficiently powerful for layout descriptions of complex nature of the
reports people are already producing with our product.

Therefore, I'm acutely aware that we can't just drop an existing XSL parser
into our app (assuming there was a portable C or C++ one) as we have to do
a lot more processing with the styles, and extend the XSL standard right
now.

The other thing that I haven't probably made clear to anyone following this
argument is that we are not starting from scratch. The report writer exists
at present.

A typical scenario is an application that creates a bunch of c++ objects to
output a report. This logic is all there - what we are doing with XML is
building an engine to re-create the same report objects currently
constructed with application code. Our use of XML is as a saved document
format, more akin to using XML for data interchange. Therefore, using
XSL+XML to output 'styled XML' then parsing the latter for visual
presentation or printing, is a lot more work than necessary.
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

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