[Filterproxy-devel] Re: : : FilterProxy XSLT

[Bob M. <mce...@dr...>]

Mario Lang [la...@zi...] wrote:
> Bob McElrath <mce...@dr...> writes:
>=20
> > So as long as all the xsl files are in one directory (or in a dir
> > relative to xsl/), we should be able to include them by specifying a
> > relative path.
> >=20
> > In the example you sent me, (for slashdot) I'm seeing black-on-black te=
xt.
> > Do you get that too?
> I realized it after a sighted coworker pointed it out to me :)

Are you truly blind?

Is FilterProxy+XSLT a useful tool for you?  That would be neat!

How are you able to navigate, edit, and create complex documents like XML? =
 Do
you use a braille terminal, or is speech synthesis useful?  How do you hand=
le
all the wacky characters in xml like <>:, etc.?  Braille doesn't have
characters for those, does it?

Please forgive my curiosity, I don't mean to intrude.  I don't think I've e=
ver
met a blind computer user before!  I can't imagine using a computer without
sight!  I use very high resolution on my monitor and small fonts to get the
most information on my screen, doing it without sight must be very
challenging!

> It has to do with the html somehow being wrongly parsed, but I never
> really checked why. I use XSL primarily for extracting
> text content out of overdesigned webpages. Just as
> that slashdot example shows...

What is interesting to me is that you could use it to remove ads by examini=
ng
the content.  The only problem is that it's very site-specific.

> ... Ahh, I found it. The original page has the same
> color and bgcolor set to 000000. Seems that they used some other tricks
> to make the text readable... So after extracting that stable,
> those tricks get lost it seems.
>=20
> Maybe we can add sanity checks to the xsl file in some way,=20
> but I am fairly new to xsl either. In fact, as the comment sections of
> those now in CVS show, they are written by T.v.Raman for the Emacspeak
> audio desktop.

I'm very new to it also.  Someone pointed it out to me a long time ago, as =
the
"right" way to do what I was trying to do with the Rewrite module.  However,
since XSLT won't let you use regexes, I think both have their place.

> > It's pretty fast too, on my machine that slashdot rule only takes 0.3s.=
  Neato.
> > ;)  (the rewrite rules on slashdot take ~3s for me)
> Thats basicly because we really use libxslt and libxml for
> the hard work. Although I am suprised that it is really that much faster,
> xslt is a quite heavy operation.=20

My machine is pretty slow, comparatively, at doing Rewrite rules (it's an
alpha).  Comparable x86 machines often beat me in Rewrite times by a factor=
 of
more than 3.  I'm not sure why.  Probably has to do with poor code optimiza=
tion
on the alpha.

Parsing html/xml, with it's matched-nested-tag structure, is very
computationally intensive.  I've toyed with the idea of "treeing" the docum=
ent
first, to make multiple traversals much faster.  I'm sure this is how the C
libxml/libxslt does it.  The perl module HTML::Parser does this too, but
somehow ends up being slower than my regexes anyway.  (initial versions of
FilterProxy used HTML::Parser, but I found I could write a faster regex, and
since then I've made many speed enhancements)

Frankly, the speed hit in parsing matched-tag documents (like XML) is why I=
've
been totally skeptical of people using XML for everything (i.e. xml-rpc).  =
But
anyway...XSLT is still a cool idea.

> I thank you for those fixes. Saved me alot of time..

No prob.  I was excited to play with XSLT!

> > Problem is that errors/warnings generated by Mason don't have accurate =
line
> > numbers.=20
>=20
> I already had to experience that. And its no fun, truly.

I was using Mason 0.89, they're up to 1.0.4.  I'll have to do some more che=
cks
to see if the problem still exists with newer versions.  I'll bitch at them=
 if
it's still giving bad line numbers.

> > BTW, you should join the filterproxy-devel list, and we can continue
> > discussions there, so others can see what you've done!  ;)
> Done :-)

I've added you to filterproxy-devel.  It seems you didn't get subscribed...

> I tried to send the reply for you to the list, but
> sf.net seems to have problems. I cant send to that list,
> and there is no archive on the sf.net webpages.

It should work now.

Geocrawler was written by a stoned monkey with massive brain contusions.  I=
t's
almost completely useless as an archive anyway, and flaky at best in actual=
ly
archiving any messages.

For a while the mailing lists showed up under "public forums" and that was
really cool, but they broke it.  I think the sourceforge people are using u=
s as
guinea pigs for all their ideas, then when they get the code perfect, the
remove the feature from the public site and put the feature in their (close=
d)
commercial code.

Cheers,
-- Bob

Bob McElrath (rsm...@st...)=20
Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison, Department of Physics