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Re: stylesheets, dtd vs schema, implementations and stuff :)

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Hi Mattias.

I think for every application different things are going to acquire the
focus. In my case, because we're going from an existing intranet
application, are main objective is producing a modular application that is
easy to maintain, and easy to customise for the client. Cascading changes
through the site wasn't a major things once I'd thought of doing it, but
linking did cause me a bit of a headache, and I decided to express links
along the lines of...

          <column side="left" id="Navigation" present="open"
scrolling="false">
               <label>Menu</label>
               <link role="content" resource="html">
                    <url type="aggregate">asp/load.asp</url>
                    <url type="data">xml/nav_xml.asp</url>
                    <url type="style">xsl/nav_xsl.asp</url>
               </link>
          </column>
          <column>
               .....with a series of columns and a body expressed...

...the XSL that transforms this file basically produces a frameset out of
the XML and then specifies SRC attributes for the frames out of the link
tags...

<FRAME marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" noresize="true" name="Navigation"
frameborder="no" scrolling="no"
src="asp/load.asp?side=left%26width=normal%26present=open%26label=Menu&amp;
data=xml/nav_xml.asp&amp;style=xsl/nav_xsl.asp" />

...From this I can specify a frameset easily, and just as easily swap
different parts in and out of frame, adding and removing frames easily
also. load.asp in this
case is a generic loader that loads the specified XML and XSL files,
performs the transformation, and writes the results. You can also see the
values getting
passed through here, that in turn get passed to the XML(ASP) file, which
when transformed influences the resulting mark-up in this way you can
cascade data from resource to resource as you aggregate it.

In the above side says whether the resulting FRAME/column is on the left or
 right, width specifies one of three preset width, and open whether the
frame
starts opened or closed as I'm using some dHTML to allow the dynamic
opening/collapsing of frames.

My point being that I found that far more options where available to me in
terms of expressing resources and linking. Hopefully this will all die with
 the
advent of XLink/XPointer, but until then some creative thinking can give
you extra mileage.

As far as our back-end goes we're lucking. We're using ObjectStore, and
have our own custom COM objects to interface with our data. In the past
where we
used to have an object returned and had to query or interate through it to
construct mark-up, we now simply make a query and get a large chunk of XML
expressing all the data for us, then simply transform this data with XSL
and hand it off to the browser.... it's beautiful :)

I've said it before, XML with XSL is going to have a huge impact on
developers currently using ASP or equivalent server-side scripting.

Cheers
     Guy.





xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 01/20/99 09:30:55 PM

To:   xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc:    (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID)
Subject:  stylesheets, dtd vs schema, implementations and stuff :)




[SNIP]
I'm doing alot of research on xml and xsl at the moment, the question is ,
is it ready to put to the test on fullfledged site, anyone tried? (using
iis4 and msxml.dll that is) What was the major issues etc. I'm thinking of
defining my data in xml, have it processed into sql server and then have
queries output xml .. seems like a powerful and flexible solution.
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Mattias Konradsson, Internet Specialist
ICON Medialab
mattias.konradsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
designSPACE http://www.fragzone.se/preacher/designspace/




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