Mailing-List: contact cocoon-dev-help@xml.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Message-ID: <387B8C8E.A50FC92F@algx.net>
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 14:03:26 -0600
From: Brett McLaughlin <bmclaugh@algx.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: cocoon-dev@xml.apache.org
Subject: Re: Thoughts...
References: <022d01bf5c6d$be739620$2308063e@eddie>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Ross Burton wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Today while laying in the bath - which is recognised as a means towards
> great thinking :-)  - I was pondering about Cocoon, specifically what could
> be done with XSP and the soon-to-be-implemented sitemap.
> 
> 1) Cocoon needs more output formats: plain text, RTF and TIFF/PNG would be
> very nice.  Then Cocoon can output most useful formats: XML, HTML, PDF, RTF,
> raw text and images.

Ummm... I say this as nicely as possible, so as not to offend... are you
sure you are up on what XSL/T does?  Cocoon is limited in its output
formats only by how well you can transform the XML you give it. 
Certainly some binary data such as PDF relies on additional programs,
but if it can be represented by hand, it can be transformed to that
representation.  Now if you are talking about writing additional
formatting-objects... go for it, but that's way beyond our scope here...

> 
> 2) Would dynamic document translation be possible?  My thoughts are that a
> user requests a document, then either through the HTTP headers or a argument
> in the URL it is translated into another language using something similar to
> Alta Vista's Babel Fish.  A very nice feature point IMHO.

Again, this is about XSL, not Cocoon in particular.  You may want to
check out more on XSL and what it does: http://www.w3.org/XSL.  Cocoon
already can decide on what stylesheets to apply based on request
headers, etc.  You just have to have the right stylesheet to apply for
what you want.

> 
> 3) A XSP taglib to do directory/file management (listing directories,
> getting file information) would be handy.

This is not a bad idea ;-)

> 
> 4) The sitemap needs comprehensive user-agent matching - In my opinion it's
> not the browser the sitemap needs to concern itself with, it's the
> capabilites of that browser.  Knowing that the user is using IE means that
> you can probably use CSS, knowing that it is IE3 on the Mac means that you
> really shouldn't...  Taking pointers from M$ IIS and PHP's browscap file,
> knowledge of the users ability for JavaScript, CSS1, CSS2, Java etc. means
> stylesheets can be more general.

We talked earlier about implementing something like that.  If you have
the bandwidth, go for it!

> 
> When I find the time (not now - I have three of my finals in 2 days) I'll
> probably implement some of (1), play with (3) to learn XSP and think about
> (4) until the sitemap is implemented.

Go for it, but I'm not sure you are clear on what (1) really means,
IMHO.  Might want to check out XSL/T more.

-Brett

> 
> Regards,
> Ross Burton
> IT'z Interactive