RE: Application Design

[Leigh Dodds <ldodds@ingenta.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Al B. Snell [mailto:alaric@alaric-snell.com]
> Sent: 14 August 2001 09:49
> To: Leigh Dodds
> Cc: The Deviants
> Subject: RE: Application Design
> 
> 
> On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Leigh Dodds wrote:
> 
> > However my main point is that there's nothing implicit in the use
> > of XSLT that requires the a push (i.e. we must know the exact
> > input document configuration in advance) versus a pull (i.e. let
> > the designer request what they need) architecture. These are
> > separate issues.
> 
> I've not yet looked at XSP, but the thing in XPath that seems to imply a
> push architecture to me is that it's a transformation from an input
> document to an output document.

Take a look at [1]. Eric van der Vlist introduces very clean way to 
partition a stylesheet from its presentation.

Now if you process the presentational XML document, and then 
generate the input document to your stylesheet according to the data 
requirements in the presentation

(i.e. pick out those <user/>, <shopping-cart/>, etc tags and 
generate the appropriate XML). 

Then your stylesheet just formats that provided data.

You can generate the input document using whatever technique 
you like (SAX filter pipeline for example), and you've kept complexity 
out of the stylesheet. Indeed there never has to be an input XML 
'document' at all: just the appropriate SAX events.

[1]. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/07/26/xslt/xsltstyle.html