BURGHARD Éric wrote:
If you look at the core components, no one follow such a hard constraint.
Some serializers do radical transformation (svg2jpeg, links, ...), while
some transformers only do very light transformation (encodeurl, i18n, ...).
If you take the links serializer for example you will find that the output
is radically different than the input (and this is a serializer). If you
take the svg2jpeg serializer you will see that the ouput is just a "view"
of the input, because apart the file format "radicalisation", a lot of
information disappear during the convertion from vectors to bitmaps. So i
could perfectly do a silly xsl serialization that only display the root tag
name of the input (it still a view of my input) and call that a
serialization.
I was not familiar with the LinkSerializer, so I took a quick look at
it. Your point is well taken here; this serializer appears to be an
anomaly. It acts like a transformer, but happens to do out.println() as
its output instead of SAX events (to be fair, it actually *does* produce
SAX events as well, but those events appear to get swallowed.)
I'm getting a tad off-topic here, but IMO this "serializer" would be a
better fit, and far more useful, as a transformer. For instance, what
if I wanted to serialize the extracted links as a PDF document instead
of text, or run another transformation on them before serializing?
Having the link extraction transformation and serialization combined
together does not allow this.
As far as svg2jpg, I don't see your point. Every last bit of the SVG is
taken into account when producing the bitmap representation.
