At 05:47 AM 5/6/2005, David wrote:
If the PI is inadequate, can anyone else come up with an alternative?
Or perhaps a list of use cases that a solution should meet?
One alternative would be to accept that sending XML over the wire to be
styled on the client with a lightweight styling and transformation
language has not been a universally popular proposal, so to abandon the
XML experiment and revert back to using full SGML on a back end server
system and using dsssl rather than its lightweight younger sibling, XSL
to transform the in house semantically rich markup down to presentation
oriented formats such as html 2 and postscript and sens that over the
wire to be displayed on clients that don't need (and don't have) much
processing capability.
Yeah, that's one alternative. SGML forever!
Another is to encourage browser vendors to push their own proprietary
frameworks further. I keep thinking that XUL and XAML should address this
space, although I haven't had time to investigate the possibilities and see
how close they are to doing so. While I know that here we're very far from
getting "standards", the fact is that sometimes a proprietary
implementation of something is necessary to get the idea out into the
marketplace to demonstrate its usefulness.
An obvious use case is to allow a client to switch stylesheets at the
user's request, the way Softquad Panorama used to do (that was nice, and
useful).
(As I recall, some smart person asked about this very issue from the floor
on the last day of the XSLT-UK conference back in 2001 ... and she didn't
get an answer.)
Cheers,
Wendell
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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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