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Table rendering with XSL and <spanspec>
- To: docbook-apps at lists dot oasis-open dot org
- Subject: DOCBOOK-APPS: Table rendering with XSL and <spanspec>
- From: Michael Smith <smith at xml-doc dot org>
- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 01:53:23 -0800
Out of curiosity as to whether there are differences in the way the
stylesheets process tables that include the <spanspec/> element (which
really should be deprecated anyway since it's not part of the OASIS
Exchange Table Model subset of CALS), I made a sorta complex table,
and processed it with both the DSSSL and XSL stylesheets.
The DSSSL HTML stylesheets seem to have no problems at all producing
correctly rendered HTML table output. I fed the following to Jade:
http://www.logopoeia.com/tbloutput/spanspec.txt
http://www.logopoeia.com/tbloutput/nospanspec.txt
...along with docbook.dsl, and Jade (ignoring the usual annoying
warning messages) produced:
http://www.logopoeia.com/tbloutput/spanspecDSL.html
http://www.logopoeia.com/tbloutput/nospanspecDSL.html
Admittedly not a "real world" table -- but nonetheless, applying the
DSSSL stylesheets produced identical, correctly rendered table output,
whether I specified horizontal spans by setting attributes using the
<spanspec/> element, or by setting them on the <entry> elements.
On the other hand, I ran the same XML by both Sax and XT along with
docbook.xsl (or chunk.xsl if you want), and got instead:
http://www.logopoeia.com/tbloutput/spanspecXSL.html
http://www.logopoeia.com/tbloutput/nospanspecXSL.html
That is, I got different results depending on whether or not I used
<spanspec> -- and neither is correctly rendered.
In fact, it seems like the XSL stylesheets don't work at all with
<spanspec/>, though they do seem to work fine with less complicated
tables, as long as you specify the spans on the <entry> elements
themselves, instead of through use of <spanspec/>
I'm not complaining about support for <spanspec/> -- because I've
never really seen much point in using it, and because I normally have
<!ENTITY % cals.table.module "IGNORE"> set in dbpoolx.mod, so I'm
using the Exchange subset (soextblx.dtd) instead of full CALS -- and
that subset doesn't include <spanspec/> anyway.
But it would be nice to see the XSL stylesheets work with tables as
well as the DSSL sheets do.
--
Michael Smith mailto:smith@xml-doc.org
XML-Doc http://www.xml-doc.org/
see also: Logopoeia http://www.logopoeia.com/