Re: RFE: Graphical manipulation of table spans

Hi Mike,

yes, XSLT might be a bit of overkill for this case, but it would be nice in
geenral to have an XSLT transformation engine, and it would do this job fine.
(I don't really care how the function is implemented of course).

Actually tables are more than just a layout convention, they specifiy some
kinds of 2-dimensional relationships between data - which is more powerful
than general XML tree structure, and less powerful than full RDF graphs. It
turns out that there is a lot of such data around, so it is a useful
construct to have, but as you say it does mean rethinking some conventions to
get the interface right.

Cheers

Charles

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Michael Smith wrote:

  Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org> writes:

  > language easily. Would it be possible to add an API to an XSLT processor,
  > and write the transformation as an XSLT (this would be a good thing to do in
  > general)?

  Hm, using XSLT to handle it kinda seems like it might be overkill to
  me. I have not idea how the similar functionality is handled in other
  apps, but I'm sure it's not with XSLT.

...
  Yeah, tables are always sort of an exception. Even in a DTD like
  DocBook that by design does not include any other presentational
  markup, you've got to have markup for tables, which is really just
  saying how the content should be presented/formatted/arranged
  visually-- in an paricular arrangement of an explicit number of
  columns and rows and spans, which can't vary no matter what output
  format (PDF, HTML, whatever) the content ends up being delivered in.

Received on Sunday, 9 December 2001 22:07:39 UTC