[SlugBug] a perl/xslt question. potentially inappropriate.

[Chris J]

And Lo! The Great Prophet Mike Dewar uttered these words of wisdom:
> That's great! I was making things harder than they needed to be, and i 
> didn't realise you could apply a template that you hadn't created... I 
> suppose if you don't specify a template it just gives you the text in 
> the tag?

Essentially yes. The actual rule basically says:
	- when you apply templates to an element, process its child
		elements
	 - when you apply templates to a text node, give its value

...so in essence, you're just getting the textual information.

> 
> Would making it a bit more human-readable be a huge problem? The reason 
> I ask is that the wiki should be human-editable once it's up... this 
> mucking about with xml should just be to populate the wiki to begin 
> with. Everything after this should remain in the wiki. Having readable 
> text will make it easier for people who aren't used to editing things 
> like this to go ahead and edit the wiki....

It might depend on the XSLT implementation, but some dirt simple poking 
about managed to churn out some more useable output:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">

        <xsl:template match="/">
                <xsl:apply-templates />
        </xsl:template>

        <xsl:template match="P"><P><xsl:apply-templates /></P></xsl:template>

        <xsl:template match="VERB">'''<xsl:apply-templates />'''</xsl:template>

</xsl:transform>

...notice I've essentially removed the newlines from the P and VERB 
templates. With sablotron, this gives:

<P>
        For a vector or a matrix '''x''', '''y=sum(x)'''  
        returns in the scalar '''y''' the sum of all the entries
        of '''x'''.</P>

Copying text nodes can often be hit and miss; I've never quite got the 
whitespace to appear as I want it. It is possible to insert explicit 
newlines with <xsl:text>, but sometimes extra newlines can appear where you 
don't want them. More often than not it's a case of restructuring the XSLT 
to suppress the newlines, as above.

Usually it's never a problem though as I'm using it to spit out HTML or XML 
for further machine processing, and not for human consumption... :-)

Chris...

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