Posted by Tony Marston on 12/16/55 11:57

<ReGenesis0@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1157516805.174374.5960@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
> Tony Marston wrote:
>> I think you are trying to do too much with DOM. In my framework all
>> screens
>> are built using XSL transformations, which means that I must have
>> intermediate XML files to hold all the data that is going to be used by
>> the
>> XSL stylesheet. I never use XML files to manipulate data, just to hold
>> the
>> data which is to be passed to an XSL stylesheet. Each XML document has to
>> be
>> written to the structure expected by the stylesheet, and once it has been
>> transformed the XML document is discarded.
>>
>> I do not use XML documents for persistent storage, they are transient -
>> created, processed, discarded.
>
> So how do you create your transient XML files from data?

See http://www.tonymarston.co.uk/php-mysql/domxml.html for PHP 4
See http://www.tonymarston.co.uk/php-mysql/dom.html for PHP 5

> I just... XML is suppsoed to be the universal interchange format
> for data. (Whether you believe it's particularly good for that is up
> to you I guess) Why... REDUCE it to just an intermediate step for xsl
> transformations?

Because I don't *need* XML for anything else.

> Why not just send your data as variables to Smarty or
> something?

Beacuse I don't know Smarty but I do know XSL.

> (I guess, you want the power of the xsl:template
> includes... but not give up the querying speed of a sql database, which
> is valid.)

As you said yourself, XML is an *interchange format* not a *persistent
storage format*.

> ...I don't want that power. ;-) (Or rather I want something else
> specific.) I don't want to REDUCE XML to an itnermediate step in
> templating. There are tools for manipulating it in trees, therefore
> it's possible, just the actual application is escaping me.
> I guess, I don't find "but it's AWKWARD" to be an adequare answer
> here. There's a dom, and tools for manipulating XML. But you can't
> manipulate XML?

The tools for manipulating XML are supposed to be better in PHP 5 than PHP
4, but the whole pointof XML is *not* to be manipulated, simply written by
one process and read by another process. It is used to exchange data between
different processes, not to provide a storage mechanism as a replacement to
an SQL database.

--
Tony Marston

http://www.tonymarston.net
http://www.radicore.org

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