> So we really are transforming one XML dialect to another. Natch.
> There may be some tendency to confuse templating in the > XSL sense and templating in the web-page sense. I don't > think they are interchangeable. Agreed. I think you can use XSLT for *other* purposes besides as a web-templating language. But you *can* use XSLT as a web templating language. It's actually pretty good for that. The thrust of my argument here is that Manakin *should* use it in that way. Or, more precisely, it should use it that way *more* than it already does. Parts of the Manakin XSLT already follow the approach I'm advocating. The header, the footer, parts of the sidebar, and the community/collection/item displays alread follow this "web template" approach. And those are the parts that are easy to understand. If I want to add or remove elements from the full item display, I can do that very easily. They are laid out in a way that makes sense. But doing something like removing the search box from the home page is no way simple or intuitive. It took us a long time to figure out how to do things like that. It shouldn't be that difficult. --Dave ================== David Walker Library Web Services Manager California State University http://xerxes.calstate.edu ________________________________________ From: Mark H. Wood [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 7:45 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Dspace-tech] manikin question Picky point: the Theme stage does not produce HTML; it produces XHTML. So we really are transforming one XML dialect to another. It's just that the output dialect has (by design) the nice property that it has an agreed-upon meaning to web browsers and can be rendered in a standardized way as pages. I think we would get a lot more comprehensibility if we just split up the huuuuge structural.xsl into a collection of modules, concerned with various bits of the UI, and added a lot of commentary and perhaps a user's guide. Having done that, we might more clearly see how to further refine the collection. A good sharp look at the code might indeed suggest that page types could be pulled out. But I'd like to plead with the community to design first and *then* execute, rather than assume that all who have gone before us know more about our task than we do and simply copy what they have done. There may be some tendency to confuse templating in the XSL sense and templating in the web-page sense. I don't think they are interchangeable. Let's see what we get from the current logical organization and whether it's worth keeping, however we rearrange it physically. There's already some modularity: the metadata Handlers pull out quite a bit of stuff that one doesn't often need to examine and would not wish to wade past. That said, I'll add my voice to those who say that the current code is difficult to understand and might be made less so. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [email protected] Balance your desire for bells and whistles with the reality that only a little more than 2 percent of world population has broadband. -- Ledford and Tyler, _Google Analytics 2.0_ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ DSpace-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech
