Re: Semantic markup for tabular data

[Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>]

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Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net> wrote:
1. Does XML have enough horsepower to tackle that level of recursion and interdependency between data and table structure)?
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It should. It's easy enough to tell the xsl to look for all movies where George Lucus is the director, then output all of those movies. As for only wanting to output Lucas' name once, that too would be easy enough. It should be able to be done with just XSL. If it's not possible using just XSL, then it certainly would be possible using XSL and JavaScript (or some other language).

As for data that determines the structure of the table, that too would be easy enough to do. The way I know how to handle this is to use your standard HTML tags for tables, and then be very careful about how you set up the stylesheet. That's the part that takes a bit of getting used to. Recursion can really make your head hurt if you're not used to it and mistakes in the stylesheet can lead to really interesting output, sort of like the rendering mistakes they show on the Shrek DVD for Donkey. :-)

I've never work with the situation described, so I don't know for sure, but it certainly sounds like an interesting exercise that I may take a stab at. I'll probably need to do something like this on my own site as I change it over.



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2. If so, is the level of effort required to execute something like that justified? Or would traditional manual methods be cheaper and easier short of a requirement for immense, rapidly changing datasets and instant dynamic output builds?
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Yes, depending on your project.

The example took me about 30 minutes to put together. But I also used some chunks of code from other XML stuff that I'm working on and used techniques I already know. Was it worth the time and effort? I think so because I put in very little effort to get back something that can be pretty useful, especially if I have a lot of this sort of thing to do. On another project, this effort may not be worth it.


Just as a side note, depending on how complicated the relationship between your data, you might end up better off going with a relational database instead of XML.



********************************************
Sean Hower - tech writer
http://hokum.freehomepage.com



What the original poster in this subthread (sorry, I've deleted it and 
don't recall who it was) was talking about was more complex tables in 
which there is a semantic relationship between the data in one row and 
the data in another row _that determines the structure of the table_ [my emphasis]. Suppose, in your example, that you had listed, in addition to the data already there, some other George Lucas movies (Star
Wars sequels and others) and some other movies with Mark Hamill (not 
directed by Lucas). Now you want a table with vertical straddle cells so that Lucas's name occurs just once and Hamill's name occurs just once. 
(Never mind that you can come up with extensions of this idea that are 
logically impossible. Let's just stay with this dataset and assume it is possible.)

I think the questions are:

1. Does XML have enough horsepower to tackle that level of recursion and interdependency between data and table structure)?

2. If so, is the level of effort required to execute something like that justified? Or would traditional manual methods be cheaper and easier short of a requirement for immense, rapidly changing datasets and instant dynamic output builds?

Note: I am not asking you to demonstrate this, only to take a SWAG at 
answering the questions.

Thanks,

Dick



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