xml-dev - Sv: Dissillusioned about interoperability.

["Henrik" <webdev@bluprints.com>]

How about XSLT ?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Richard Lanyon <rgl@decisionsoft.com>
To: <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, October 08, 1999 5:32 PM
Subject: Re: Dissillusioned about interoperability.


> On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> > At 05:13 PM 10/7/99 -0600, Kent Sievers wrote:
> 
> > >A tool like, say, a markup language other than XML?  One that only had one 
> > >way to mark up a simple name/value pair?  That is what we left behind.
> 
> > We haven't left anything behind yet, not by a long run.  What I'm talking
> > about is a tool that would let you map:
> > 
> > everybody else's damn structures -> my structures
> 
> You're going to need to do this with a transformation language of some
> sort - no other solution is going to be flexible enough to deal with the
> variety of formats in which data is likely to appear. I don't think this
> is a problem with XML, however, because I don't think specifying
> structures was the problem XML set out to answer. Indeed, a system
> rigorous enough to give only one layout for arbitrary data would probably
> be so complex that no-one would ever use it. The main advantages are:
> 
> a) XML frees us from writing new parsers to accompany every new structure.
> b) XML is sufficiently familiar to anyone who's used HTML that it might
> actually catch on.
> 
> The real problem is thus that writing transformations seems so painful,
> and that's really a fault with much of the current software available to
> do transformations. I'd like to think that XML Script (www.xmlscript.org)
> is a significant improvement in this field.
> 
> > Mike Hatalski pointed out IBM's XML Translator Generator - it's one option,
> > though I'd like to see it given a prettier face.
> > http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/aw.nsf/techmain/5F60964153C4274788256776006817AA
> 
> The problem being that this is essentially a DTD-to-DTD mapper. Lots of
> XML "out there" in the real world is going to be DTD-less or have very
> underspecified DTDs. More importantly, you're often going to find that you
> want your transformation to depend on the content/attributes of an
> element, rather than the element type. This is certainly the case with
> <object type="myType">content</object>
> Where you need to look at the `type' attribute to do your transformation.
> This is comparatively straightforward in XML Script, where you can do
> things like:
> <_if test="object.type == myType"></_if>
> or
> <_foreach object="object{.type == myType}"></_foreach>
> 
> -- 
> Richard Lanyon (Software Engineer) |     "The medium is the message"
> XML Script development,            |             - Marshall McLuhan
> DecisionSoft Ltd.                  |
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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