Re: Is XHTML a dead end?

On Fri, 2002-09-27 at 21:05, Tim Bray wrote:
> On Friday, September 27, 2002, at 11:38 AM, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
> 
> > Since you seem to feel that it's an important issue, I have done the  
> > exercise and that's not *that* complex!
> 
> Thanks Eric.  So if I wanted to write some XSLT to extract & process  
> all the XLinks and some other stuff in the XHTML, I'd use a two-step  
> process?  Step one like this to generate XLinks in an easily-accessible  
> names, then step 2 is straightforward generic XSLT to reorganize the  
> XHTML and XLink and whatever else it contained?

Yes, that's probably the easiest option, using a node-set() extension
for instance. The recognition of the HLink definition could also be
spread within the logic of the "final" transformation, but this would
add a complexity which is not something to wish except for very simple
transformations.

I would like to add also that this transformation doesn't solve (of
course) the issue of having several links in the same "tag" and that
other rules should be declared or hardcoded to generate embedded
elements to host these links (if that's the way we want to go). 

Disclaimer: my purpose was just to illustrate the level of complexity of
such a transformation to answer Didier's question.

> For example... suppose we had some nice modern XHTML2 with  
> properly-nested DIVs and so on, and hyperlinks scattered around.   
> Suppose I wanted to produce a nested table of contents with just  
> hyperlinks, losing all the other text; basically lose anything that's  
> not a <div>, <h[0-8]>, or hyperlink.
> 
> How would the approaches compare if the source were XLink vs HLink?

In this case, the transformation would probably be easy enough that we
can try to do it in one pass with HLink as with XLink.

It's also worth noting that XLink is easy to process with XSLT as long
as we are speaking of simple links, but more complex (not very complex
but still more complex) as soon as we start using complex links (the
declaration of the locators add an extra step when you follow the arcs).

Eric


>   -Tim
> 
-- 
Rendez-vous à Paris.
                          http://www.technoforum.fr/integ2002/index.html
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 16:09:45 UTC