The task Martin wants to perform is exactly the kind of thing that XSLT is good at and could do easily.
I also see Peter's point, echoed here. Until we have a markup language that handles overlapping hierarchies natively, all proposed solutions will be annoying in some way. Still, I have a higher opinion of the abilities of XSLT than Peter does (I've been using it in font development, of all things, so I look at it as pretty flexible), and I'll bet it could handle the XML workarounds for overlapping hierarchies such as the one proposed in the paper by Alexander Czmiel linked to by James Cummings.
But if a thing has got to perform fast, it might be best to use the XSLT to create static pages or a database, or turn data from a database into pages, rather than have it dynamically create pages from a large underlying text.
Peter Baker
Martin K. Foys wrote:
At 08:49 AM 23/06/2004, Peter Robinson wrote:
If you can do it (and I have not yet seen this done, though I have heard lengthy explanations of how it *might* be done) you can only do it with great difficulty with the standard tools. The problem here is our old bugbear overlapping hierarchies, and XSLT etc just don't have any easy answer to this -- and maybe no reliable answer at all.
I have not worked with XSLT, so this might seem like a naive question, but is it possible to write a bridge program to copy text from a specific starting tag to an ending tag, create a new file for just that text, and then display that file next to the MS image? ~ Martin Foys
Martin K. Foys Assistant Professor Department of English Hood College Frederick, MD 21701 vox: 301~696~3740 fax: 301~696~3586 ether: foys@hood.edu Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition: http://www.sd-editions.com _______________________________________________ dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l