On 14 Jul 2009, at 16:43, TomWilcox wrote:
Hi Tom, Georg,
I look forward to getting into the IF however I was under the
impression it
is still very much in the development phase..
Well, it is only available in the SVN repo, so in the sense that it is
not officially released yet, it is indeed in development. That said,
some users consider trunk to be stable enough to use in production
environments.
The benefits of the new IF are mainly: optimized parsing (faster) and
it is better documented than the Area Tree. The Area Tree XML will
probably remain alive for some time. In some use-cases, the new IF
could lack some of the more detailed structure information that is
preserved in the Area Tree.
It's really up to you, but we encourage to use the newer IF, since
that is ultimately one sure way of getting feedback based on real-life
scenarios. All we know for a fact is that our test-suite does not
fail, but that is no guarantee whatsoever that everything is A-OK.
However, I would like to propose a potentially useful future
feature of
FOP would be the ability to do this using Java objects with a view
for
optimising modifications of document fragments such as a subtree of
the AT
through an API (as I think either yourself or Andreas mentioned
earlier).
IIC, the reason we opted for XML formats in the first place, is that
one does not really need a specialized API to perform such
manipulations. Why double the effort if XSLT already provides you with
basically everything you need?
All you'd need to do is write some stylesheet code to modify/
manipulate either the Area Tree XML or the IF, and use the standard
JAXP pattern to apply the stylesheet to the intermediate XML. That is
basically the same pattern that you already use to feed the input to
FOP...
Any ideas where I post suggestions for FOP features?
A Bugzilla entry would be a start, but do mind the above reservations.
I would be reluctant to introduce such a feature (and thus increase
our maintenance overhead), for something that is fairly
straightforward to achieve using standard JAXP and XSLT (requiring no
changes to the FOP codebase, and still offering all the flexibility
that one could desire, IMO)
Regards
Andreas
Andreas Delmelle
e-mail: andreas.delmelle.AT.telenet.be
Skype: adlm0608
Jabber: [email protected]
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