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Re: [xml-dev] DIDIER'S LAB REPORT


This ssems conceptually similar to the content generation model found in
Webmacro (http://www.webmacro.org) and Velocity
(http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/index.html). Both are open source
templating servlet engines that apply a MVC pattern to the
management/generation of dynamic content. Neither are explicit XML
engines, but the ideas and code could likely be leveraged to do more or
less what you want.  Indeed, a few months back I discussed a similar idea
with the main developer of Webmacro, and he felt that XML-based
'templating' would be relatively straightforward to implement. 

Mind you, his idea of 'straightforward' is very different from mine.

It might be fun to look at these two packages, and see if the ideas /
designs are adaptable.

Best --

Ian 

On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, Didier PH Martin wrote:

> DIDIER'S LAB REPORT
> --------------------
> 
> To my friends...
> 
> After a long period of silence and intense work for a startup, I am back in
> my labs for new experiments.
> 
> Recently, I burned a bit of glucose for some mental processes about the
> notion of transformation. Juggling with the concept, reading my past notes,
> discussing with others about the topic, I came to this perspective....
> 
> ACTUAL TRANSFORMATION CONCEPT
> -----------------------------
> The actual concept about XML transformations is that the transformation
> process is applied on an XML document. Thus, for instance, an XSLT
> stylesheet is applied on an XML document and the result is a new XML
> document (or a text/HTML document). The process flow is then:
> 
> XML document ----> XSLT stylesheet process -------> new output document
> 
> We can say that an XSLT stylesheet is like an interpreter used to process a
> particular XML based language. The XML document is the source code and the
> XSLT stylesheet is the document containing the interpretation rules.
> 
> A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW
> -------------------------
>  Ready? here we go...
> 
> I still remind about one of my colleagues telling us that " a different
> point of view is worth a thousand point of IQ". I decided to look at XSLT
> processing form a different angle...But my IQ is still the same :-)
> 
> Let's imagine, for a moment, that we change the document processing order.
> That a stylesheet is no longer a document providing a particular
> interpretation for a particular language. That a style sheet would be, in
> fact, the main document. That a stylesheet would not be applied on an XML
> document but that the stylesheet would be _the main_ XML document. That
> external fragments would be "pulled" from the outside world and included in
> this "singleton" template. Therefore, it would be like going from a pipeline
> model (Original doc -> processing -> output) to a "pull" model (template <-
> external fragment included in the template).
> 
> 
> 
> <html xsl:version="1.0"
>       xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>       xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/strict">
>   <head>
>     <title>Expense Report Summary</title>
>   </head>
>   <body>
>     <p>Total Amount: <xsl:value-of
> select="document('http://www.mysite.com/myfolder')/expense-report/total"/></
> p>
>   </body>
> </html>
> We have here a stylesheet reduced to a literal element. In the actual
> specifications, a stylesheet may be expressed that way but will need an XML
> document as input for the transformation process. But if we reduce a
> stylesheet to a single template as illustrated above, this single template
> could be the main document and the included information coming from other
> XML document/fragment obtained through the document() function. This is the
> pull model.
> 
> The previous example's output is off course an XHTML document but, in this
> case, we didn't got a "bootstrap" XML document on which the stylesheet is
> applied. The XSLT template is the bootstrap document. Concretely speaking,
> the renderer receives the XSLT document. The renderer process the XSLT
> template by "pulling external" content (because of the document() construct)
> in the main template.
> 
> The main point here is that an XSLT stylesheet with a single template could
> be fetched and processed.
> 
> 
> Thus, if we let our imagination to be free for a moment, an XML document
> like for instance a VoiceXML, XHTML or SVG document could include XSLT
> constructs to "pull" content form the external XML world.
> 
> Single template XSLT document <------- external content
> 
> The value of using a "pull" model for an XSLT document would be that
> authoring tools specialized for rendering languages authoring (based on XML)
> could easily include XSLT compliant constructs and therefore be used to
> build XSLT compliant documents. In fact, this would help to provide to the
> customers a "standard" format to replace the plethora of actual template
> based systems. Thus, we would have two ways to render documents
> 
> a) we start from an XML document used to encode a data model and then we
> apply a stylesheet on it. The XML document is then transformed into a
> rendering document.
> b) we start from an XSLT template (reduced to a single template) and this
> latter is processed by an XSLT processor that "pulls" external content to be
> included in the XSLT "singleton" template.
> 
> cheers
> Didier PH Martin
> 
> 
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