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Table rendering with XSL and <spanspec>


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/



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