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Re: [xsl] Implementing Conditional Text

2012-06-12 16:00:25
A drawback of using PIs is that it will be very hard to enforce any rules about them, because most schema technologies simply ignore them. Even your rule that says the PIs won't cross element boundaries will be hard to enforce. Also I doubt that XML editors are very helpful in assisting with creation of PIs.

I'd go for attributes, permitted on any element, including the option of a span-like inline element used only for the purpose. In my experience most conditional text tends to be at the paragraph level:

<p when="special">

Michael Kay
Saxonica

On 12/06/2012 21:39, Craig Sampson wrote:
Hello,

We, our publications XML support group, are being asked to support conditional 
text in our source documents.

We've come up with an idea but before going any further I thought I'd run it by 
this group to see if anyone had done this before or if anyone had a better 
solution.

We plan to use processing-instructions (PIs) entered by the authors that would 
indicate which conditions were on or off. These PIs would be inserted near the 
top of the documents. There would be additional PIs identifying the beginning 
and end of conditional text strings. We would use a XSL transform to preprocess 
these documents and convert the PIs into pseudo elements that could then be 
processed in a second XSLT preprocessor would keep or discard the strings based 
on the conditions set in the PIs at the top of the document. The resulting 
document would not have any of the PIs or pseudo elements just the content that 
was kept.

We want to use PIs so we don't have to dirty up our DTD with conditional 
elements that would be allowed everywhere. I can't think of any way to 
eliminate the conversion to pseudo elements which solves the problem of 
identifying and controlling the conditional text.

We are not allowing the conditional text to break existing element boundaries 
or to be nested within other conditions so the following example should 
represent what we're trying to do:

<topic>
<p>Mary had a little<?condStart normal:true?>lamb<?condStop normal:true?><?condStart 
special:true?>pony<?condStop special:true?>...</p>

In the example if the PIs at the top of the document set "normal" to "true" and  
"special" to "false" then Mary had a little lamb. If both conditions are set to true then Mary will 
have both the lamb and the pony.

Can anyone poke holes in this solution or suggest a better way to accomplish 
this.

Thanks,
   Craig
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Craig R. Sampson    SAS Institute Inc.  email: 
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