use Perl

• TEI and XLink (Score:1)

  by cyocum (7706)

  One of the things that I think is missing from TEI is XLink [w3.org]. A project that I called the "Critical Edition Browser" which would graphically show the connections between various recensions and copies of a text so that no one text is privileged over any other text (a classical critical edition set-up tends to do this). Basically, what I would want is two TEI encoded texts that have XLink arcs to each other in such a way as to show the lemma and stemma between the two (or more) texts. This would obviate the
• XSLT (Score:1)

  by Aristotle (5147)

  The first frightening realization that I had to wrap my head around is that, for all the ways I naturally think in Perl, they think in XSLT.

  Just…ponder that for a few minutes.

  Nothing bizarre about that at all. :-) I can’t claim to be a decade-of-experience expert in XSLT as I can claim to be in Perl, but I am very good with the language, and I like it a whole lot. The syntax is dreadfully verbose, but at the semantic level – its computation model – it is extremely elegant. You can
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by aurum (8572)

    I guess the thing I find frustrating about libxml2 is that I want a nice compact way of saying "Get me the one&only FOO child element from the one&only BAR element of the document." Am I missing something?

    It's also possible - moderately likely, even - that I'll convert my parsing to a SAX model, and that will make that particular frustration go away.

    However, the real problem I have with libxml2 at the moment is that it doesn't like the TEI RelaxNG files, and I don't know whose fault that is. It me
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      Am I missing something?

      Yes, XPath. Forget the DOM API, and for the most part, SAX as well.

      However, the real problem I have with libxml2 at the moment is that it doesn’t like the TEI RelaxNG files

      Ah, yes. The validation support in libxml2 is not all that great.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    I may have asked this before, but is it XSLT you like or XPath? I've never managed to like XSLT, but I do like XPath. The syntax isn't always perfect, but I can't think of improvements.
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      Both. XPath isn’t dreadfully verbose; XSLT is. (It would greatly benefit from a non-XML rendition of its syntax, just like RelaxNG has both an XML and a Compact syntax.) But the basic model (recursive node visiting) is a perfect match for XSLT’s job. The apply-templates directive is basically a map with polymorphic callback using XPath-based dispatch. That’s all there is to XSLT.

      Of course, most people write for-each-heavy transforms instead, so they gain none of the elegance of this model.