Hi Christian,
...As I mentioned before (to one of stefano's posts), we did something similar, but with the TAL syntax. We convert that to XSLT with XSLT and then do the actual transformation with XSLT. It's the same idea as yours. I like the approach, even though it's not complete yet (our implementation) and we could certainly add some of your ideas...
Sorry that I overlooked this, I was busy at the time and forgot about it (and we didn't meet at the non-happening Bern dinner, too bad - our day will come ;-).
...http://svn.bitflux.ch/repos/public/bxcmsdemo/themes/bxcms/ template.tal.
Trying to jump into the head of the "average HTML template designer", to me this looks more complicated to understand than the example at http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/HtmlToXsltExperiments. But you're setting attributes and I'm not, might account for some of the differences in (perceived) complexity.
...I don't say, our approach is better than yours, I didn't build an opinion on that. But maybe we could join efforts in it. As it's a pure XSLT implementation, the programming language behind doesn't really matter...
Right, this is purely an XSLT thing. And joining efforts is good, even if it's only stealing ideas back and forth. I don't think we (Cocoon and bitflux) necessarily need to agree on everything, the resutling XSLT code won't be very big anyway.
After replying to Daniel, I think having a "declarative rules" section or not in the template is a key point: IMHO the "copy some elements with minor changes" scenario is very common, the bindings.xml use-case in my example shows this.
How would you handle this with your syntax? For example, transforming an XHTML input document by adding class attributes to <table> and <p> elements, without knowing where they appear in the input?
In my example you just need to add a "declarative rules" section like this, assuming you have an apply-templates in the main section:
<div id="atl-templates">
Note that we can add text here to explain what's happening.
Here we add a class attribute to p's
<div match="p">
<p class="cool">
<div apply-templates="node()"/>
</p>
</div> Add a border to tables:
<div match="table">
<table border="1">
<div apply-templates="*"/>
</table>
</div>
</div>-Bertrand
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
