On Tuesday, 14. January 2003 19:55, S Woodside wrote:
> > I took this approach at first, too, but it was too limiting later on.
> > My
> > current approach: Generate meta-form tags, i.e. arbitrary
> > placeholders. Use
> > one stylesheet to arrange these items the way you want, use a second
> > stylesheet to convert the meta-form tags to real html tags. This way
> > you can
> > control the design much more. The arranging stylesheet could set
> > additional
> > attributes on the meta-form tags to control visual details of the
> > conversion,
> > like the "size" or the "cols" parameters, while the second stylesheet
> > takes
> > care of generating the correct <input>/... element with appropriate
> > maxlength="" parameters and such.
>
> You mean the first stylesheet? Which does which.
My processing stack looks like this:
XSLT 1 XSP
XML (data) file -----> XSP page -----> pure meta-form output
XSLT 2
-----> nicely laid out meta-forms (i.e., meta-form+design)
XSLT 3
-----> nicely laid out html-forms
-----> more XSLT if you want/need
XSLT 1 and 3 are always the same, I wrote them once and they apply to every
document.
The XSP step does the actual validation and updating, mostly
through a taglib for this very purpose. XSLT 2 does the actual layout, it is
different for each xml file "type". I haven't had this before, but my
customers had exact requirements for layout/design, so I added that step. I
do the layout on meta-form elements because that's easier to rearrange than
html form elements, which can get quite complex. (imagine image upload fields
with preview or a set of checkboxes).
I didn't yet find a way to reduce the number of steps through import or
similar... it seems like I really need 4 steps.
> > If you abandon NS4 once and for all (and IE3 of course ;-), this is
> > manageable. You need 'only' two DOM tree access functions, one for IE
[...]
> Hrmmmmmmm... I'd rather only write the code once. If going with DOM
> means writing two DOM versions, and also providing server-side code for
> people with ECMAScript off, then I think i'd rather just write the
> server side code only.
Well, after realizing this fact, I planned to write a small W3C-DOM emulation
for IE when I do the next larger ecmascript thingy, so that the actual
programming can happen once, while the emulation layer takes care of the icky
browser-dependent details. If you take a similar route (not that difficult, I
bet you don't actually use more than 4 or 5 DOM functions), you can do your
scripting once. Of course, server side is more important.
--
CU
Joerg
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