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RE: xsl:sort in old MSXML

2003-07-01 12:54:51
Wendell,

I understand your concept. I agree on the Descriptive issue. 

I don't get the Procedural one. In your msg you've said "write XML at home and 
convert it into HTML". I think from this excerpt that you mean that 
instructions can be kept and run inside an XML file. I still don't get how. I 
only associate the process to de XSL language, providing an HTML output.

This is why I asked David to let me know where on earth I can find a conceptual 
model of the whole architecture.

It still puzzels me how the data-process-presentation three tiered layout is 
kept with all this tools/languages/transformations/schemas.

Claudio.

-----Original Message-----
From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com]
Sent: Martes, 01 de Julio de 2003 04:28 p.m.
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: RE: [xsl] xsl:sort in old MSXML


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(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com]
Sent: Martes, 01 de Julio de 2003 12:58 p.m.
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
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".


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Wendell Piez                            
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
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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