[Zope] Re: Zope digest, Vol 1 #330 - 50 msgs

[Tres Seaver]

> From: Alexander Staubo <alex@mop.no>
> To: "Zope Mailing List (E-mail)" <zope@zope.org>,
> "'Jim Fulton'"
> <jim@digicool.com>
> Subject: RE: [Zope] ANNOUNCE: XMLDocument 1.0a1
> Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 05:31:28 +0200
> 
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Jim Fulton [mailto:jim@digicool.com]
> >Sent: 25. juli 1999 14:13
> >To: Alexander Staubo
> >Cc: Zope Mailing List (E-mail); 'Amos Latteier'
> >Subject: Re: [Zope] ANNOUNCE: XMLDocument 1.0a1
> >
> >
> >Alexander Staubo wrote:
> >>
> >> Now all we need is an XSL processor so we can transform XML
> >documents to
> >> HTML etc. on the fly. Anybody know of a Python
> >implementation of such a
> >> gizmo?
> >
> >There are a couple.  We plan to integrate FourThought's 4XSL
> >with Zope.
> 
> Thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately it only works on Unix, though.
> 
> >I expect this will look like "XSL methods".
> 
> Well, how would you invoke them? It would be appropriate, say, to have a
> single folder's XML documents all point to one XSL style sheet. In fact,
> since the XSL style sheet of a document can be defined in the XML itself
> -- the syntax escapes me, but I believe it was an XML SI -- this
> information could be used for overriding the "default" XSL style sheet.
> 
> >Also node that *all* Zope objects support DOM at some level
> >as of Zope 2.0 beta 1.
> 
> Any examples of this?
> 
> Alexander Staubo             http://www.mop.no/~alex/

Guessing wildly, but I believe that you are thinking of XSL as meaning the
"Document Type Definition" (DTD) for a given class of XML documents:  the DTD
defines the allowable elements/attributes for its class, and is normally
referenced at the head of the document;  it can be defined or overridden within
the document itself.

XSL is a slice-and-dice query/transformation language, based on the DSSSL
beloved of SGML geeks (itself based on Scheme, I think).   An XSL style-sheel
_renders_ an XML document, just as DTML renders Zope objects.

Frankly, the most exciting news about the XMLDocument is that I can put off
learning XSL, and just use DTML and Python instead.

-- 
=========================================================
Tres Seaver         tseaver@palladion.com    713-523-6582
Palladion Software  http://www.palladion.com