[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
On 07-13-2005 4:25 AM, Pete Cordell wrote:
> Does that imply that XSL could be used on any hierarchical text based
> data input with a suitable front end that can extract events that mirror
> XML's elements and attributes etc?
>
> Going further, observing the idea of using out of band data (e.g.
> schema) to provide extra information to complete 'binary XML', could XSL
> (with suitable front ends) work on say an ASN.1 encoded X.509
> certificate (and ASN.1 message definition) and produce, say, a PDF output?
>
> Not that I have a need to do that right now! I'm just interested to
> know whether XSL can be used as a kind of universal data translator.
It's possible in several ways:
1. Michael Kay has pointed out already that XSLT 2.0 includes
unparsed-text()
2. Brian Goetz wrote an article that showed how to use the JTidy
toolkit to run XQuery against HTML, by converting it on-the-fly
to XML. This same idea could work with XSLT.
See http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp03225.html
3. It is already fairly common to output PDF files from XSLT
via post-processing. This is what Apache's FOP and RenderX's XEP,
among others, already do very well.
See http://xml.apache.org/fop/ and http://www.renderx.com/tools/
4. Stylus Studio (disclaimer: our product) uses a similar idea to
provide a host of adapters for converting non-XML formats to or
from XML. The very simplest let you run XSLT (1.0 or 2.0) or
XQuery against a comma-separated-value file, and the more complex
allow transparent operation against EDI files or relational
databases.
See http://www.stylusstudio.com/docs/v62/d_flatfileconversion10.html
I just gave a presentation on this very topic at one of our sister
division's annual conferences. The entire presentation is at
http://www.stylusstudio.com/exchange/transforming.html - including
slides and audio.
--
Sincerely,
Tony Lavinio
Stylus Studio Principal Software Architect
http://www.stylusstudio.com/
|
