Re: [Xsltforms-support] Problems with external user CSS

[COUTHURES A. <ala...@ag...>]

Hi Benoit,

Thank you for testing XSLTForms.
> 1) When I insert a stylesheet link <link 
> href="http://sisal.dvp/corpus/stylesheets/sisal/sisal.css" 
> media="screen" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> in my page. I 
> obtain, after transform by my Firefox, an empty inline style 
> <style>{}</style>.
>   
Because XSLT 1.0 is used by XSLTForms to parse CSS external file, its 
content has to be an XML document. Adding a document element, such as 
<css> at the beginning and </css> at the end, is enough. Hopefully 
browsers are not disturbed by this if your intend is to also use the CSS 
file in non-XForms situations.

This can also be done dynamically at server side, for example with URL 
rewriting and a generic script for that. The test environment for 
XSLTForms is based on such a mechanism and you can have a look at 
http://xsltforms.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xsltforms/txs/css.txs?revision=85&view=markup 

> 2) So I tried to directly inline my CSS in the page with <style> 
> markup. It's better but some CSS rules are corrupted. Ie:
>     div#banner div#applications ul.tabs li { margin-left: 0px; 
> margin-right: -6px; list-style-type: none; display: inline; }
> become
>     div#bannerdiv#applicationsul.tabsli { margin-left: 0px; 
> margin-right: -6px; list-style-type: none; display: inline; }
> I suspect a pb around the "cssconv" template. I tried to modify the 
> line #2188 from:
>     <xsl:with-param name="sels" 
> select="translate(substring-before($input,'{'),' ','')"/>
> To
>     <xsl:with-param name="sels" 
> select="translate(substring-before($input,'{'),' ',' ')"/>
>
> And now it works better (rendering is OK, javascript not...), but 
> since I don't really know what the "cssconv" template does I'afraid 
> I'm breaking some thing else.
>   
Yes, this is an already known bug in the beta release. You better test 
with the latest work version in the SVN repository at 
http://xsltforms.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xsltforms/trunk/build/
> 3) And a general question : what do you think about XForms generation 
> directly from XSD definition of documents ?
>   
Some years ago, I was very disappointed by a similar approach for 
relational databases based on DDL to automatically generate forms. 
Today, from XML schemas, possibilities are more interesting and some 
people, such as Dan McCreary, are definitely working on this. I haven't 
seen yet what can be produced. The main difficulty is that usually users 
need condensed interfaces. Data and presentation don't necessarily have 
the same goals.
> PS: For information, I try to embbed "eXist" and "xsltForms" in an 
> existing Ruby on Rail app (tired by SQL and ORM...) 
The beta release of XSLTForms has recently been added in eXist 
distribution !

Thanks!

Alain Couthures
<agenceXML>
Bordeaux, France
Twitter account: AlainCouthures