Mailing-List: contact cocoon-users-help@xml.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Message-ID: <3A80309F.A9C38C09@apache.org>
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2001 12:13:03 -0500
From: Berin Loritsch <bloritsch@apache.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: cocoon-users@xml.apache.org
Subject: Re: Plain text from Cocoon
References: <F432FD7971892C4A91031E28464030A731DB6C@hermes.mogul.no.>
 <008a01c0905f$7d9b3370$0200000a@peter>
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"Peter C. Verhage" wrote:
> 
> << Hi!
> 
> I wan't plain text output from cocoon, but somehow it gives an
> error message unless i include som html-tags. How can i get plain
> text without the tags ? >>
> 
> You probably can't. Because of the simple reason that XSL(T) is ment for
> transforming one XML file to another. So you always have to make a XML tree
> with XSLT, whatever the program that interprets the output does with it is
> up to the program (for example transform it to a PDF or HTML document), but
> you cannot use XSLT to create a plain text file without at least some root
> tag.

That's not necessarily true.  Otherwise XSP and VRML won't work.  The
way it works in Cocoon, is you must have root tags.  Everything can be
translated to text inside the base tags.  The TextSerializer or
similar mechanism in Cocoon 1 will strip out the root tags.

Example:

<root>
This is plain text.

We can have some more text.

And even some more.
</root>

When put through the TextSerializer, will strip the root tags and you get:

"This is plain text.

We can have some more text.

And even some more."

(quotes included to show that it is one string).