Standardised API [Was: Adapt Saxon-CE event model to XSL-FO?]

On Fri, April 19, 2013 10:46 pm, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
> On 04/17/2013 09:54 AM, Tony Graham wrote:
...
>> I've been reading about how Saxon-CE [1] handles user input, and I'm now
>> wondering whether the same sort of pattern could be adapted to handling
>> feedback from the XSL formatter.  Saxon-CE does it [2] through template
...
[ SNIP ]
>
> Very interesting post, I am *still* digesting it. :-)

That's fine.  It took me a while to write it, so I'm certainly not going
to complain if anybody takes their time over reading it.

> You're quite right about our first POC: it allows for some pretty simple
> XSLT logic perhaps in a second pass, but without more direct access to
> the guts of the formatter (through a standardized API) you're not going
> to do more than that.

FWIW, I set out this evening to write a DOS batch file for running the jar
but have so far only got distracted by other things.

> I have to confess, I am sort of looking at this approach, it's what I
> was talking about at the beginning.

That's fine, too.  In some ways, I've been counting on you doing that
since any big ideas about expressing event handlers will still need a way
to connect to the XSL formatter, and vice-versa.

And I guess that's the bit that I haven't seen when you've talked about
APIs: how will ordinary mortals who aren't of a programming bent make use
of these APIs?

This also gives me another opportunity to bang the drum about needing a
common understanding -- an object model, even -- of what makes up the area
tree.  There is a model defined in the XSL-FO spec, but it's distributed
throughout the spec as FOs are defined rather than being in one section or
being written with knee-bone-connected-to-thigh-bone sort of plainness.  I
started a wiki page about it a while ago [1] but only managed to spend a
lunchtime on it.  I'd like to see a list of the types of areas, a
description of what other area types an area can contain, and a table
showing the area types returned by each FO, so the simple list that's
currently there is barely scratching the surface.  Any help that anybody
can give in gleaning details from the spec would be appreciated.

Regards,


Tony.

[1] http://www.w3.org/community/ppl/wiki/XSL_1.1_Areas

Received on Friday, 19 April 2013 22:41:46 UTC