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>[Eliotte Rusty Harold]
>Much more important is that his test case is:
>
>XML documents contain (among other things) text phrases that must be
>converted into equivalent LaTeX phrases. Some text phrases, such as "&"
>and "$" have special meaning to LaTeX and thus must be escaped during
>processing. Others represent text idioms like "(C)" that must be mapped to
>their LaTeX equivalents ("\copyright{}").
>
>In other words he wants to do string manipulations on unmarked up text.
>Furthermore, his output format is not XML, but LaTeX. Moertl is taking
>XSLT and using it to do exactly what it was designed not to do. He is
>completely confused about what the intended purpose of XSLT actually is.
>It was never intended to do what he wants it to do. It shouldn't be a
>surprise he has trouble. Nor should this be considered a knock on XSLT,
>since none of his use cases are something XSLT was ever intended to handle.
Oh I dunno. I believe he has a very good point. XSLT has trouble
manipulating things that are between the tags.
In any evolved (read "succesful") markup vocabulary most of the interesting
stuff is *between* the tags. This
is basically Herman Zipf's "Principle of Least Effort played" out in markup
languages. I have written
about this in this months XML Journal ("Soft Issues surrounding Industry
Standard Schemas" http://www.sys-con.com/xml/)
Any XML transformation system that limits itself to explicit structural
transformation
is of limited use in the real world.
There are those who would argue (and I was one of them in a previous life)
that the way to fix this
is to provide an "escape" into a procedural environment - be it an embedded
scripting language
or an escape to roll-your-own extension functions.
I no longer believe this is a good answer and, as I said at Paul Prescods
excellent XSLT
talk in Orlando, I believe the answer lines in pipeline architectures which
facilititate
the mixing and matching of different XML processing paradigms in a single
execution context.
BTW, I have done some analysis which shows a good fit between the frequency
of element types (tags)
and Zipf's inverse square law http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Zipfs_law in
XML corpora.
I'm searching for other work in this area - any pointers appreciated.
Sean
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