[tei-council] Today's little puzzle

[Martin Holmes]

> When people ask me why I don't document the XSL,
> I wonder whether anyone actually _reads_ http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-xsl-common/

I have seen that, but it's hard to figure out how it applies to the 
Guidelines. They have their own guidelines.xsl.model; that gets renamed 
to guidelines.xsl and changed a bit before use, such that instead of 
importing 
http://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/stylesheet/odds2/odd2html.xsl it 
imports the local copy in your TEI install -- or possibly the version 
from the repo if you supplied that as a parameter. That then imports a 
stack of other stuff. I find it impossible to remember where things 
happen, so I have to figure it out anew every time.

This is not a criticism at all -- it's just an acknowledgement that this 
stuff is really hard to figure out, and it has often defeated me in the 
past.

With regard to the suggestion for a pre-processing step: xmllint is 
wicked fast at doing XIncludes, and I bet there would be a noticeable 
time penalty if we were to do them with XSLT, but if we could achieve a 
lot of other work at the same time it might be worth it. We should 
definitely test whether it would be quicker to do the near-identity 
transform just to process the PIs, then use xmllint on the result to 
expand the XIncludes.

Cheers,
Martin


On 13-04-24 10:44 AM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>
> On 24 Apr 2013, at 18:38, James Cummings <James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk>
>   wrote:
>>>> But where on earth is the right place to put the template
>>>> for the processing instruction? My heart sinks when I
>>>> venture into the stylesheet folders...
>>> nah, this would be ad hoc transform in Utilities, like
>>> p5subset.xsl. the later stylesheets would just see vanilla
>>> TEI.
>>
>> Surely this is the problem we need to solve in helping to make
>> the Stylesheets more accessible to a larger community of developers.
>
>
>
> sorry, but this a complete red herring. I am suggesting that we add a stage
> in the Guidelines build process with an almost-identity tranform which
> expands stats PIs, and XIncludes.
>
> this has nothing to do with the general stylesheets and how to persuade
> people that it is not that hard to hack them.
>
> When people ask me why I don't document the XSL,
> I wonder whether anyone actually _reads_ http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-xsl-common/
> --
> Sebastian Rahtz
> Director (Research) of Academic IT
> University of Oxford IT Services
> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)