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XSLT stylesheet highlighter / whitespace with output method text


Subject: XSLT stylesheet highlighter / whitespace with output method text
From: rolf@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2000 04:01:35 +0100 (MET)

Just the other day I got curios. XSLT is capable to convert XML data
into HTML. XSLT stylesheets are XML data. Isn't it possible, to write
a XSLT stylesheet, that convert XSLT stylesheet into some kind of HTML
source code listing with some basic highlighting?

I didn't found anything about this topic within the web. Only Mike J
Browns Fancy XML Tree Viewer is some kind of related, but this clever
work has his focus on introspection.

I've appended my attempt. I don't claim that this stylesheet is
clever or even works as pronounced. It hasn't any real practical
importance. There are a obviously some limitations. But it's nice.

This stylesheet tries to reproduce a XSL stylesheet as much as possible
as a HTML document and adds some simple highlighting. It should be
not to hard to write a similar simple XHTML highlighting XSL
stylesheet. For example (and if you use James Clarks xt) you could say

  xt xsl_highlight.xsl xsl_highlight.xsl xsl_highlight.html

and you get a HTML representation of the xsl_highlight.xsl stylesheet,
that (nearly) looks like the stylesheet viewed with a text editor.

For my attempt the whitespace stripping rules of the used XSLT
processor obviously are crucial . In theory, every conformant XSLT
processor should produce (maybe nearly) the same HTML output file -
maybe not the one I expect, nevertheless. In reality this isn't
true. I tried xt110599, saxon 5.2, xalan 0.20 and
oracle-xmlparser_v2_0_2_7. Well, I got 4 different results. The xt
output is the only one that looks satisfactory.

You may say whitespace isn't mostly significant within HTML and your
basicly true. But there is this "mostly" - and this makes a big
difference in some cases, not only within <pre></pre> elements.

There is an amusing detail. Change the xsl:output method of this
stylesheet to "text" and xt and saxon produces very similar - but, of
course, very senseless - output files.(I haven't checked with xalan
and oraxsl, sorry for that, this beasts are all incompatible, it's a
mess.) Complete control over the whitespace within the result document
seems possible, according to the "text" results. Come one, have a
heart for the purists and do this for the HTML output also.

Greetings
rolf








<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:output method="html"/>

  <!-- The main template. Builds a basic html Skeleton and calls the rest -->
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <html>
      <head>
        <title>Highlighted xsl Code</title>
      </head>
      <body bgcolor="#ffffff">
        <pre>
          <xsl:apply-templates select="*|text()|comment()|processing-instruction()"/>
        </pre>
      </body>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>


  <xsl:template match="text()">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="comment()">
    <xsl:text>&lt;!--</xsl:text>
    <xsl:element name="i">
      <xsl:value-of select="."/>
    </xsl:element>
    <xsl:text>--&gt;</xsl:text>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="processing-instruction()">
    <font color="red"><i><xsl:value-of select="."/></i></font>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="*|text()|comment()|processing-instruction()"><xsl:call-template name="notempty"/></xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise><xsl:call-template name="empty"/></xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="notempty">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="substring(name(.),1,3)='xsl'">
        <xsl:element name="b">
          <xsl:text>&lt;</xsl:text>
          <xsl:element name="font">
            <xsl:attribute name="color">blue</xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
          </xsl:element>
        </xsl:element>
        <xsl:call-template name="stylesheedattributes"/>
        <xsl:element name="b"> 
          <xsl:text>&gt;</xsl:text>
        </xsl:element>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
        <xsl:element name="b"> 
          <xsl:text>&lt;/</xsl:text>
          <xsl:element name="font">
            <xsl:attribute name="color">blue</xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
          </xsl:element>
          <xsl:text>&gt;</xsl:text>
        </xsl:element>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:text>&lt;</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
        <xsl:call-template name="attributes"/>
        <xsl:text>&gt;</xsl:text>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
        <xsl:text>&lt;</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
        <xsl:text>&gt;</xsl:text>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="empty">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="substring(name(.),1,3)='xsl'">
        <xsl:element name="b">
          <xsl:text>&lt;</xsl:text>
          <xsl:element name="font">
            <xsl:attribute name="color">blue</xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
          </xsl:element>
        </xsl:element>
        <xsl:call-template name="stylesheedattributes"/>
        <xsl:element name="b">
          <xsl:text>/&gt;</xsl:text>
        </xsl:element>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:text>&lt;</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
        <xsl:call-template name="attributes"/>
        <xsl:text>/&gt;</xsl:text>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:template>
        
  <xsl:template name="stylesheedattributes">
    <xsl:for-each select="attribute::*">
      <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
      <xsl:element name="b">
        <xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
      </xsl:element>
      <xsl:text>="</xsl:text>
      <xsl:element name="font">
        <xsl:attribute name="color">blue</xsl:attribute>
        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
      </xsl:element>
      <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="attributes">
    <xsl:for-each select="attribute::*">
      <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
      <xsl:text>="</xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="."/>
      <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

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