Hi posters of this list,
As an exercise to finally start with XSLT 2.0, I've created a set of
stylesheets that produce a graphical representation of the post activity on
this list (or any other list).
So what does the output look like?
http://users.telenet.be/root-jg/f/postStat/rendered.png is the png version of
the generated svg file http://users.telenet.be/root-jg/f/postStat/result.svg.
Due to some MIME-type problem, you'll need to save that file to the disk first
before viewing; alternatively, try this html container:
http://users.telenet.be/root-jg/f/postStat/container.html
==The process of generating the output==
In what follows, all URL's have this xml:base
"http://users.telenet.be/root-jg/f/postStat/";
For your convenience, I've bundled this base directory:
http://users.telenet.be/root-jg/f/postStat/postStat.zip
===The input XML===
The stylesheet takes a threads-based archive file of biglist as input (found at
http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/#browse). Unfortunately, the
format is html (and not even valid), so I had to tidy it up
(http://infohound.net/tidy/).
A sample input XML is this tidied up XHTML thread-based archive of this list:
archive.xml (the original was
www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200508/threads.html)
===The stylesheets===
I used a chain of stylesheets to make the process reusable and extensible.
* The main stylesheet: time-based-linear-svg-stat.xsl
** imports: post-archiver.xsl
** includes: color-scheme-posters.xsl
They are all in XSLT 2.0 format.
The processor I used was Michael Kay's Saxon 8.5 .
===The output===
The output is an SVG graphic representing a time-based linear dot chart.
To the top 10 of posters, a color-scheme is attributed.
I would have liked to scale the dots according to the post's size, but biglist
doesn't provide this information. Please point me to better archival pages
(preferable XHTML), if you know about them.
==conclusions drawn from the statistics==
* There are less posts during weekends
* Most activity is between 8 am and 11 pm (GMT)
* Michael Kay is the most active poster, moreover his posts span over 16 hours.
Please note that I'm just an amateur without statistical education. This part
is just for fun.
==My motivations to code it==
* I like statistics. (This is not the first time I wrote an XSLT to present
stats: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/300/30075.html)
* It's an exercise to get used to XSLT 2.0 and Xpath 2.0, after reading Michael
Kay's books on these topics.
* I used this project to test my coding efficiency. I imposed myself a
dead-line of 12 hours.
* It makes use of SVG, which I like to promote; It's used far too little IMHO.
* I hope the process to obtain the input file makes clear that switching to
XHTML should be done rather yesterday than tomorrow.
==Why did I post this on this list?==
* Since I used statistics of this very list as a sample, some posters here
might be interested.
* It's coded in XSLT, the topic of this list. Feel free to view the stylesheet
and criticize them.
Please don't hesitate to reply with comments of any kind.
regards,
--
Joris Gillis (http://users.telenet.be/root-jg/me.html)
«Εν οίδα ότι ουδέν οίδα» - Σωκρατης
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