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RE: alternating tags in a list?

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XSL does not translate, transform, fold, spindle, or otherwise mutilate
in any way, shape or form.  XSL is intended as a *language* that
designers may use to communicate design intent - composition and style -
to machines that understand XSL.  Those machines are under no compulsion
to build a result tree.  In particular, an XSL engine designed to
produce, say, PDF, is more than welcome to do so directly, without
exposing any of its internal workings, without building the result tree,
and without supporting any API.

XSL *uses* the grammatical conventions of XML.  The designer expresses
his or her intentions using that syntax.  XSL (alas) requires that the
designer think in terms of result trees and express intention using a
treeish language.  Processors are no more required to actually build
such stuff internally than relational databases are to build "actual"
versions of joined virtual tables, or store tables in a sequence of
bytes.

The "S" in XSL stands for style.  Transformations are necessary for
style.  That other uses may be made of such transformations is a nice
side-effect, but a side-effect nonetheless.

-gregg

speaking for myself only

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 1998 4:16 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: alternating tags in a list?


Keith Visco wrote:
> 
> It might not always be the case that my end result allows me to create
> nice useful nodes in my XSL result-tree. If I wanted nice useful nodes
> in my result tree, I would have simply used the XML document, and not
> processed it at all with XSL.  

That is not true at all. The output of the transform is a *different
set*
of nice, useful nodes. You transform not because you want to map nodes
to
strings, but because you want to map nodes to other nodes.

> XSL is a transformation language, at
> least that's what I thought it was. I take my nicely structured, and
> easily DOM traversable XML document, and process it with XSL. What I
get
> out, might be another nicely structured,  easily DOM traversable XML
> document, or it might be an RTF file or PDF file or JPEG image.

That isn't true. XSL alone can only translate XML into XML. You can
translate that XML into PDF, RTF or a JPEG, but XSL itself does not help
with that (though a particular XML implementation might add that as a
nice
extension feature).


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