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Re: Making tables

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Andrew Bunner wrote:
> 
>   Definitely the answer you were looking for. Everybody hates to include
> display information in XML. This is something that scipting would fix. From
> all I've read, the WG has plan to incorporate scripting into the draft at
> some later point. 

Yes, scripting would allow you to do anything. In fact, with scripting,
you don't need XSL at all (as thousands of Python/Ominmark/Perl/Balise
programmers have noted). With only JavaScript and the DOM, you can do
everything that XSL can do and more -- you can even implement XSL. Any
particular existing feature could have been delegated to scripting, but
the brilliance of XSL is in NOT DOING SO. Given that we do already have
the DOM, the challenge of XSL is to make as much as possible available
WITHOUT scripting. The DOM already fulfills the scripting role. Then we
can make a reasoned choice about whether scripting is actually necessary,
and in what ways. As James Clark says (in his personal "extensibility
manifesto":

"- The extension mechanism is for extensibility only.  It is
                 unnecessary for common tasks."

http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/archive/msg00767.html

In this case, I think that what is necessary is a way to match pairs of
elements: patterns.

<xsl:for-each select="item,item">
    <ROW>
    <xsl:for-each select="item">
        <CELL>
        <xsl:process-children/>
        </CELL>
    </xsl:for-each>
    </ROW>
</xsl:for-each>

Even if this does not find its way into XSL, your idea of annotating the
source document could be done in the DOM before the XSL script runs. That
would allow a clean separation of concerns. In fact, it sounds like
another point from James Clark's extension manifesto: "- XSL defines a
standard mechanism for implementing extension; this would leverage the DOM
and probably be defined in IDL."

> From
> all I've read, the WG has plan to incorporate scripting into the draft at
> some later point.

The WG has a plan to incorporate *extensibility*. I don't see where they
have said that is scripting. In fact, James Clark has said that the WG did
not like XSL-note-style scripting.

If you read James' note, you'll find that his vision of extensibility does
not sound much like "scripting" in the usual sense.

 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

Bart: Dad, do I really have to brush my teeth?
Homer: No, but at least wash your mouth out with soda.


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