[Doc-SIG] DPS components

[Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)]

Garth Kidd wrote:
> Is there any problem I've missed that prevents us from
> spitting out plain XML and using transforms to convert
> it to XHTML? :)  ::

I would certainly imagine that would be possible, assuming (as I do)
that all of the DPS node tree information gets dumped as XML
elements/attributes. Of course, for most people it might not be a very
user-friendly mechanism...

>     Reader-parser-[optional transformer]-writer
>
> Transformers take a DPS tree and spit out another DPS
> tree, right?

Hmm - essentially (although I think we need to discriminate between
"pure" DPS tree (or "simple"?) which just uses the DPS defined nodes,
and "extended" DPS tree, which also uses application-specific nodes.

I *think* that the parser may be emitting an "extended" tree, but that
David's intent is that the input to the *writer* should be a "standard"
or "pure" tree. So one could define a transformer as the entity that
renders an extended DPS tree into a standard DPS tree - this makes it
clear that it is *very* optional if one *has* a standard tree already.

Of course, the other reason one might want a transformer is to amend the
tree in some manner - for instance, it seems to me that the transformer
is what would sort out intra-document references...

> Is the intent something along the lines of the following? ::
>
>   Writer.write(Transformer.transform(Parser.parse(Reader())))

Yuck! But yes, I would imagine that if one is willing to accept all the
defaults, one might want to do that.

Tibs

--
Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)      http://www.tibsnjoan.co.uk/
.. "equal" really means "in some sense the same, but maybe not
.. the sense you were hoping for", or, more succinctly, "is
.. confused with". (Gordon McMillan, Python list, Apr 1998)
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