[Mailman-Developers] email schema / XSLT

emf i at mindlace.net
Fri Jul 7 00:07:40 CEST 2006


John Dennis wrote:

> Speaking of stylesheets and customized UI, are you planning on having
> the core mailman code generate xml, which then is transformed with xslt?

This would be nice. My immediate target is getting email into an 
ElementTree, and then displaying it using some combination of python and 
the xslt transforms available in kid.

 From an ElementTree, an XML representation is falling off a log; I will 
certainly make that available but clearly I might not have The One True 
Schema within the summer.

> This might be more flexible than relying on javascript to control what
> is presented to the user.

When I used XSLT to handle formatting of a large xml file for display, I 
got into some painful pickles that could only be resolved by resorting 
to JavaScript.

A trivial example: Get a unique list of elements from an XML file 
according to an attributes' presence or its value. Perhaps doable with a 
recent xslt engine on the server, but not in any browser I know of.

Mostly it seems like going from rfc2822 -> ElementTree -> XML -> XSLT -> 
XHTML is more overhead than rfc2822 -> ElementTree/Kid -> output XML.

The mbox is currently the canonical format; I don't intend to mess with 
tradition.

> Sites can then replace the xslt if need be.

They should be able to replace the kid templates if need be, or suck the 
straight XML representation and go to town.

> Javascript still has a very valuable role to play and I'm not suggesting
> not using it, but rather introducing an xslt transform means there would
> be very little a site could not customize without ever touching mailman
> internals.

Hopefully this will still be true with the Kid templates.

~ethan fremen


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