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RE: [xsl] xsl:sort in old MSXML


Subject: RE: [xsl] xsl:sort in old MSXML
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:27:36 -0400

Claudio,

I'm not (at all) sure I understand the question.

If you mean "descriptive" markup vs. "procedural" markup ... XML can be used for either, though it's particularly well-suited to the latter. In the use case I'm describing, your XML would likely be "descriptive" hence "represent[ing] data, not instructions". Maintain your data in XML, use HTML to publish it. Nothing radical there at all.

How do you take it I was comparing XML with HTML? What I was describing was an architecture for a publishing system that takes advantage of XML but requires neither client-side, nor dynamic server-side processing to get from XML into HTML or other formats such as PDF. In return for accepting some limitations (e.g. user-configured rendering), you get quite a bit of freedom in this model.

Probably that doesn't clarify, so if you could rephrase what you don't understand in what I said, I'd be grateful. :->

Cheers,
Wendell

At 12:55 PM 7/1/2003, you wrote:
Wendell,

I thought the XML as a way to represent data, not instructions. Why you compare with HTML?

Claudio.

-----Original Message-----
From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Martes, 01 de Julio de 2003 12:58 p.m.
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [xsl] xsl:sort in old MSXML


Claudio,


At 09:18 AM 7/1/2003, David wrote:
> > I don't have access to a server (I did some applications in a free
> > site hosting), the transformations aren't done in this case in the
> > client side?
>
>If you don't have access to either a sever or a client that can do XSLT
>then you can't use XSLT, you have to just write HTML.

You can still, however, write XML at home and convert it into HTML in batch
mode, then serve up the HTML the old-fashioned way.

"Poor man's XML". Yet a surprisingly effective way to use it -- you still
get many or most of the advantages of XML: you can tag your documents to
their type instead of maintaining the HTML tagging, which is useless for
anything but web pages. Assuming you do the design right, you'll still get
XML's economies of scale (from the "separation of format from content" etc.
etc.), robustness and reusability of your data, and all that. (Whether this
would be worthwhile in your particular case, of course, depends on why
you're using XML.)

It's the application of markup language technologies in back offices like
this, invisible to the world, that led Chet Ensign to title a book "SGML:
the Billion-Dollar Secret".


======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
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