1
2
3\environment xmlmkivstyle
4
5\startcomponent xmlmkivintroduction
6
7\startchapter[title={Introduction}]
8
9This manual presents the \MKIV\ way of dealing with \XML. Although the
10traditional \MKII\ streaming parser has a charming simplicity in its control, for
11complex documents the tree based \MKIV\ method is more convenient. It is for this
12reason that the old method has been removed from \MKIV. If you are familiar with
13\XML\ processing in \MKII, then you will have noticed that the \MKII\ commands
14have \type {XML} in their name. The \MKIV\ commands have a lowercase \type {xml}
15in their names. That way there is no danger for confusion or a mixup.
16
17You may wonder why we do these manipulations in \TEX\ and not use \XSLT\ (or
18other transformation methods) instead. The advantage of an integrated approach is
19that it simplifies usage. Think of not only processing the document, but also
20using \XML\ for managing resources in the same run. An \XSLT\ approach is just as
21verbose (after all, you still need to produce \TEX\ code) and probably less
22readable. In the case of \MKIV\ the integrated approach is also faster and gives
23us the option to manipulate content at runtime using \LUA. It has the additional
24advantage that to some extend we can handle a mix of \TEX\ and \XML\ because we
25know when were doing one or the other.
26
27This manual is dedicated to Taco Hoekwater, one of the first \CONTEXT\ users, and
28also the first to use it for processing \XML. Who could have thought at that time
29that we would have a more convenient way of dealing with those angle brackets.
30The second version for this manual is dedicated to Thomas Schmitz, a power user
31who occasionally became victim of the evolving mechanisms.
32
33\blank
34
35\startlines
36Hans Hagen
37\PRAGMA
38Hasselt NL
392008\endash2016
40\stoplines
41
42\stopchapter
43
44\stopcomponent
45 |