Re: Separating content from presentation

[Kip Hampton <khampton@totalcinema.com>]

Al Snell wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, jwells123 wrote:
> 
> > Sorry if this is an old, dead horse on this list, but does anyone see
> > any substance in the supposed "separation of content from
> > presentation" feature of XML?
> 
> This idea comes from the hope that Web servers will send XML with
> references to XSL stylesheets (as in, XSLT that transforms to XSLFO) which
> the browser will use to display the raw data - so that content and
> presentation are seperated "on the wire" to the client, making it easy to
> write clients that ignore the XSL reference and just pull out the raw
> data.

The use and usefulness of separating substance from style extends well
beyond this "gosh we hope the client does the right thing" approach.
Well designed server-side XML tools like AxKit, Cocoon, etc. are able to
take advantage of that separation to apply different transformations (or
chains of transformations) to documents based on the type of client that
is making the connection, URL paramaters/POSTed data/HTTP Cookies/etc. 

-kip
-- 
print join ' ', map { ucfirst($_->getFirstChild->getData)}
XML::LibXML->new()->parse_string(join '', pack "c*", (60, 122, 62, 60,
97, 62, 106, 117, 115, 116, 60, 47, 97, 62, 60, 98, 62, 97, 110, 111,
116, 104, 101, 114, 60, 47, 98, 62, 60, 99, 62, 112, 101, 114, 108, 60,
47, 99, 62, 60, 100, 62, 88, 77, 76, 60, 47, 100, 62, 60, 101, 62, 104,
97, 99, 107, 101, 114, 60, 47, 101, 62, 60, 47, 122,
62))->findnodes('//*[name() != "z"]')->get_nodelist;