XSL and the semantic web

[Marc.McDonald at Design-Intelligence.com]

1. If the transformation is done on the client side the result document
still loses information, it's the original document that still has the
information not the result document.

2. Transformations such as sorting could be accomplished through a rule
saying: for all objects add a sortAscending attribute and give it the value
of the attribute or name to sort by. Cases where XSL type power are needed
are more complex, say repeating the same elements in more than one place. I
don't recall a 'sort' operation in XSLT, did I miss it?

I am not really arguing against the occasional need for transformations, but
using transformations for rendering. Is there really a need for formatted
objects? Some simple enhancements to a CSS type scheme could handle most
cases.

Marc B McDonald
Principal Software Scientist
Design Intelligence, Inc
www.design-intelligence.com <http://www.design-intelligence.com> 


	----------
	From:  Paul Prescod [SMTP:paul at prescod.net]
	Sent:  Monday, June 21, 1999 5:07 PM
	To:  xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
	Subject:  Re: XSL and the semantic web

	Marc.McDonald at Design-Intelligence.com wrote:
	> 
	> FO's force you to reconstruct your elements as formatting objects
which lose
	> all contextual information from the original (both nesting and
element
	> identification). In this way it is like translating to HTML (which
was the
	> example).

	That is absolutely not true. If the transformation is done on the
client
	side then *no information is lost* in the transformation because the
	original document is still available and can be referenced through
the
	result document. The result document is just a view -- it can't
destroy
	the original information any more than a database view could.

	> Why does information have to be destroyed for presentation? It is
not
	> required (CSS doesn't do it). 

	CSS doesn't solve the problems that XSL is required to solve and
thus does
	not serve as a counter-example of another approach to solving the
same
	problems. Please see my recent messages to Simon St. Laurent for
examples.
	Here's a simple one though:

	I have a list of objects encoded in chronological order. I choose to
	display them in alphabetic order. How can I do this transformation
without
	having a presentation that has lost the chronological ordering
	information? 

	If you want the chronological order, you have to go back to the
source
	tree! This is the case with XSL and it is going to be the case with
any
	language of similar power.

	-- 
	 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only
himself
	 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

	[Woody Allen on Hollywood in "Annie Hall"]
	Annie: "It's so clean down here."
	Woody: "That's because they don't throw their garbage away. They
make 
	        it into television shows."

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