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David Carlisle wrote:
>>That makes perfect sense if you are looking at the XML as a document
>>with no semantic other than presentation.
>
>
> Actually many of my documents contain mathematics that i hope doesn't
> just have presentational semantics.
Granted, in one sense. (I'd rather not get into a tit-for-tat on the meaning of the word semantics. )
> But I just really meant the point that you re-inforced:
>
>
>>Placing simplifying constraints on the transforms seems to make it a
>>plausible approach...
>
>
> It's clearly possible, if you know what you are doing, to write specific
> transforms for specific documents that have a reliable inverse mapping,
> but the nature of XSLT makes it a highly unsuitable language for that
> use.
Well, I won't argue that, but leave that one for the XSLT engine developers out there.
> You can't simply constrain the usage by restricting to a subset of
> the language: the default behaviour of an XSLT stylesheet is to discard
> all element markup and return a character string.
If you are a tool developer and wish to utilize XSLT as an internal component, then you can indeed constrain the usage, as well as the run-time context. How to achieve that may be much less straightforward than with CSS.
Isn't the default behavior to construct a result tree? If I were designing such a system, it would probably provide meaningful defaults, and a set of small, modular transforms rather than a single monolithic stylesheet.
Having said that, I'm not currently designing such a system and on consideration I don't see any tools out there attempting to use XSLT in an interactive manner. What I see is XSLT used to construct editors' user interfaces, but this is probably not the mode of operation that you meant.
Regards,
Mitch
> Since that presumably
> isn't much use if you want to interact with the original document,
> you'll need to specify constraints on the result having the right
> properties rather than constraints on the way the XSLT is used.
> That's a rather hard thing to enforce. I would have thought a system
> designed for editing would have been better designed to use a language
> that ensures that there is a well defined mapping back from the result
> to the source.
> David
>
>
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