xml-dev - Re: Didier's lab report

[uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com]

> scenario:
> the author has to provide a style sheet processing instruction in the xhtml
> document. This stylesheet will transform any cXML element into XHTML.
> Obviously the style sheet will not do any transformation on the XHTML
> constructs and simply copy them on the output but will provide templates for
> cXML constructs (to transform them or provide an interpretation for
> transforming cXML elements into XHTML). This implies that anytime an XHTML
> document has to embed external content, the document as a whole has to
> contain a style sheet declaration. The external content is at first included
> and then the whole document transformed.
>
> Thus, when the user clicks on the link, the browser has to get the content
> fragment form an external source, include it in the info set and transform
> the wole document with the declared stylesheet having as a scope the entire
> document.  It is like doing an inclusion but at the very last moment when
> the user clicks on the link, in that sense it is a different behavior than
> the xinclude element.

Now I see the problem more clearly.  Thanks.  I've always used includes
and transcludes in situations where the origin document is in some
non-browser friendly XML format anyway and needs be transformed.  I see
that when the origina document is already in browser-ready form, the
alternatives suggested by the current specs are deficient.

Obviosly, as you state, one solution is to let the server do the
transform, and just include the result.  Current XML server technology
pretty much _has_ to have usable transform capabilities anyway to deal
with the HTML browser world.

Where this is impractical, I agree that as Edd suggested, some sort of
annotation on the origina element is desirable so that the user agent can
at least process the stylesheet on the included content without having to
scope the transform over the whole origina document.  However, I still
don't see wht this can't be handled by an extension mechanism.  We can all
agree on a namespace and vocab here on XML-DEV and not have to wait for
the W3C to step in.

<MyOriginElement xinclude:href="http://spam.com/doc.xml"
incstyle:href="http://spam.com/foo.xslt" incstyle:param="myvar='hello
world'" xmlns:incstyle="http://includestyling.xml.org/2000"/>

See, I even threw in overridden XSLT global parameters as a bonus.

Verbose, yeah, but what do you expect?  It's XML.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python