A general language for transforming raw text files from one format (and/or encoding) to another. The input files do not have to be XML documents. The output files do not have to be XML documents (though often they will be).
When you dream of software regularly, it's a bit of a worry. Anyhow, this is an idea I had while mowing the lawn today. I think it could really speed things up interconnecting legacy systems with the XML-aware world. What do you think?
XPLT borrows from XSLT and Regular Expressions (RE), but also provides a more human-readable style of Pattern-Matching, encapsulated within the Pattern element. Patterns are combined with templates and flow control semantics, that allow for very flexible document transformations.
XPL Transformers could be written on any platform, for any technology. Collections of specific and re-usable XPL documents for converting between any two text-formats could be shared and distributed.
Underlying principles of XPL
- Human Readable
- Not concerned with Terseness
- Platform Independent
- Transport Indepedent
- XPL documents are valid XML documents
How is it used?
Here are some typical scenarios for which XPLT is useful.
- EDI documents, containing data in fixed-width fields, need to be converted to XML for transmission to a web service
- A legacy system produces CSV documents. They can be converted to XML using XPLT.
- A trading partner produces XML documents that are not always well-formed. They can be 'pre-processed' with XPLT to produce well-formed XML.
- An RSS aggregator receives some documents that are in an obscure format. They can be transformed to valid RSS using XPLT
- A HTML doc needs to be parsed to retrieve certain values.
- VB.net code needs to be changed into C#
- HTML code includes embedded font tags. It needs to be altered to use CSS.
- Wiki Text needs to be converted to xHTML.
- A regular expression needs to be converted into a human-readable explanation
[Read on for further details]
'bryan' on Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:29:13 GMT, writes:
damn, there was a submission to w3 about two three years ago for some languages that did the same thing, the pattern basing on xslt was one component of these language, submitted by some scandinavian company; I'm pretty sure they were from finland, I even went so far as to download and play with the implementations they had enough to see that it worked, and then I put it aside cause I pretty much was not in the business of converting legacy data, and now I can't remember what it was called.
'secretGeek' on Mon, 03 May 2004 07:46:01 GMT, writes:
Hello Chris - it's a pleasure to have you drop by.
No I haven't written an implementation of it (i'm more of an ideas-rat) but the idea is that the W3C would take control of it, do it properly, and that after that anyone who wants to can implement it on their platform, language or technology of choice.
It's a capability that should be built into browsers, and given away free with every operating system.
There is, however, something terribly wrong with the idea. Some crucial flaw which I have overlooked in my haste to publish the idea. No one has told me what this flaw is yet -- I am just waiting to see!
cheers
Leon
URL: http://secretGeek.net
'Chris Sells' on Sun, 02 May 2004 13:23:40 GMT, writes:
Did you build this or are you just thinking on it? How would it compare to existing apps that do this kind of thing (like TextPipe [1])?
[1] http://www.crystalsoftware.com.au/buy/textpipepro.html
URL: http://sellsbrothers.com
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