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Re: How can I reindent an XML-file for readability?
At 11:35 AM 6/6/01, Janning wrote:
>very strange to use a non xsl tool to transform an xml file.
Why so? People have been doing that for years (since before XML was XML).
Sorry Janning, I don't mean to pick on you. But personally I think the XSL
"cause" is actually *harmed* by the (mis)perception that XSLT is supposed
to be perfectly suited for all conceivable transformation tasks in XML. The
very features that make it strong in some cases (say, the 80%), make it
weak in others. And that's by design (read the spec).
It appears that yours is a perfect example of the latter, since you need to
know which nodes come from which external parsed entity to get your indents
to work right. And that isn't something the XSL processor knows directly.
(It occurs to me that it does know it indirectly, via the Base URI property
on each node. If you could get access to that information somehow, you
might be able to do what you want in XSL. It would still be really ugly,
though.)
The fundamental issue seems to be that on two sides (parsing and output
formatting) the XSLT processing model assumes things will be "hands off" --
and you don't want them to be.
>sometimes i think that external entities are less powerfull than it seems to
>be..
They can be powerful, but also tricky and problematic, which is why some
old hands think they should be deprecated, presumably in favor of some
linking syntax.
Good luck,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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