[Edward Summers asked]
> Also, about a month ago, someone mentioned that they were beginning
> to work with DSSSL and Jade to render EAD documents--any luck?
I posted the query about DSSSL a few weeks ago.... I confess that I
haven't had a great deal of time to pursue the complexities of DSSSL,
but (following Michael Fox's suggestions - for which, many thanks) I
have explored the use of XSL, which I have found a rather less
intimidating beast than DSSSL, with what I consider to be a reasonable
degree of success.
For those who don't know, XSL is the Extensible Stylesheet Language,
the formatting/transformation language which is part of the XML family
of standards under development by the W3C. Like DSSSL, it offers a
great deal more than what one might initially consider "style" -
allowing the sort of transformations which, for example, allow you to
re-order elements for output. Although XSL itself is still under
development (it is still a "working draft" in the W3C discussion
process), a number of developers have produced processors which given
an XML document and an XSL stylesheet implement at least some of the
features of the proposed standard - for example, to output HTML.
The two processors that I have experimented with are Jeremy Calles'
Koala from:
http://www.inria.fr/koala/XML/xslProcessor/
And James Clark's XT from:
http://www.jclark.com/xml/xt.html
They are both Java-based tools and require that you have a Java
run time environment, but don't be put off by the minimal
documentation (as I was initially!) - once you have that set up they
are extremely straightforward to run. I think XT implements slightly
more of the XSL standard at present (more conditional processing
constructs, import/include etc) and, for the EAD work, I've found
myself using it more than Koala.
I must qualify this by saying that this is very much "work in
progress": I've been working with a _very_ limited range of
simply-structured EAD-encoded documents, and I'd like to do rather
more work on this before sharing the actual stylesheets with a wider
constituency. And of course the XSL standard itself is still open to
change! - but I would most definitely recommend the approach.
As Michael Fox pointed out to me initially, this is the way that Web
delivery is headed in the future, and although it is a developing
standard, I've done enough to convince myself that it can work in
practice in terms of generating HTML here and now.
Cheers
Pete
====================================================
Pete Johnston (Effective Records Management Project)
Archives & Business Records Centre
University of Glasgow
77-81 Dumbarton Road
Glasgow G11 6PP E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Scotland, U.K. URL: http://www.gla.ac.uk/InfoStrat/ERM/
Tel: (UK) 0141 339 8855 ext. 2166 or (UK) 0141-330-4159
Fax: (UK) 0141-330-4158
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