Dan Speck's Conference Blog

Meta-stylesheets

Meta-stylesheets

Presenter: Michael Kay, Technical Director, Saxonica Limited (http://www.saxonica.com/)

Case Study 1: UI Management

• Online banking application
  
• 400+ different output screens (but all look very similar)

First approach would be to use xsl:import to import common functionality into each of the 400 distinct stylesheets. This is not very good, though.

Another approach: FXSL (not available at the time). Provides functions as first-class objects. Higher-order programming.

Actual solution:

• Started with a master "meta stylesheet" that contained descriptions of all individual screens and business rules.
• This was processed to produce the many distinct stylesheets required for each page.

Case Study 2: Excel-to-XML conversion

Spreadsheet -> Raw XML -> Sanitized XML -> Semantic XML

Solution: A mini transformation language (XLEX)

• Describes structure of the spreadsheet and the mapping to XML elements and attributes.

Case Study 3: report generator

Orbeon pipeline:

XForms processor -> XSLT transform -> XQuery (w/ XML DB) -> XSLT transform -> XHTML

Case Study 4: Schema Generator

Didn't understand this one.

posted by Unknown @ 11:13 AM