xml-dev - RE: Can XSLT be bi-directional ? XML + XSLT -> XHTML -> XML + (XSLT)

["Ashvil" <ashvil@i3connect.net>]

>
> Is this question theoretical, or purely practical?

I was looking at some non pricey XML editors and could not find any
that let you edit the final visual representation of the XML file. XML
Spy lets you see the output in the browser view [1], but does not let
you edit it. Not sure if the pricey ones let you do that ;-)

The other part of the equation was the ContentEditable attribute in
IE5.5 which let you make the content areas editable [2].

I was thinking creating a simple XML editor which would let you edit
some data in a rich content view like MS Word document where only
certain fields are allowed to be editable using IE5.5.

The steps would be
1. Create the XML file and it's XSLT file. The XSLT file would contain
information on which data fields in the XHTML file to be editable and
may pass the XML tag information via the class attribute   [3].
2. The User edits data and saves the XHTML file.
3. Run an inverse transformation to get the original XML file.

Step 3 is the difficult one. I need help with this.

> easy to imagine a situation in which half a dozen different element
> types in the original map to "h3" in the output).

This can be rectified by adding a class attributes or some other
attribute to the h3 tag [3]. If more information (maybe adding
original tags in a different namespace) needs to be added to the XHTML
file to make this possible, I am OK with that.

> But it's always going to depend on the specific stylesheet.  If you
> write it to be reversible (then fix the bugs ... ;-), then
> it should be
> possible to reverse it, by applying {the same|another} stylesheet.
>

I would prefer to write one stylesheet and run different processor on
it, but I see your point of using another stylesheet. I want to keep
this limited to editing data rather than expanding it into a
theoretical CS problem.

Regards,
Ashvil


References :
1. http://new.xmlspy.com/features_views.html
2.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/properties/c
ontenteditable.asp
3. http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/02/02/style/index.html



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