[Zope] questions on XML and XSL

[Thomas B. Passin]

From: Gilles lavaux <gilles.lavaux@esrin.esa.it>
>
>Is someone successfully using .XSL to format a XML documents? If yes the
>document probably look nice, but how does it looks during editing??
>


Yes, I use XSL to produce HTML pages from XML documents.  You can edit the XML,
then transform it and run it in a browser to see how it looks.  Works great.
For production I run the stylesheet using batch files.

One advantage of using XML it that you can make the structure much simpler (than
HTML), so editing it by hand is often pretty easy.

>Is there some demo online where it is possible to edit a XML document,
>modify/add/delete nodes?
>(I used the sax python library to do it, but without XSL/CSS the document
>looks ugly)
>


There are a lot of editors and editor demos out there, but most of the ones I
have tried aren't too useful.  One that is useful is XED at

http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/xed.html

Works very nicely but only on Windows and Solaris.

>The only library I found for XSL and python is 'xslpattern', has anybody
>used it?
>

4XSLT is available and pretty well up to date with the standards.  Trouble is,
so far it's only working on unix/linux - they have to compile some C code and
link it in, I think - and there are a lot of parts to install to get it working
right.  But it might work fine for you:

http://opentechnology.org/4Suite/4XSLT/


The XML editors mostly can't display styled XML documents.  The InDelv browser
will, but last time I tried to use it it wasn't practical because you couldn't
troubleshoot stylesheets and it was written to an old XSL draft.  They did say
they will be fixing these problems, though:

http://www.indelv.com/client.htm

The browser part is free even though it comes with a demo version of a non-free
editor (which I haven't tried).  If they get it fully working it should be a
great tool.  It's Java, so should run most places.