Re: [ubl-dev] Creating UBL instances directly from spreadsheet

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

At 2008-09-30 11:42 +0800, Chin Chee-Kai wrote:
>Thanks for the note, Ken.  Glad to hear that XSLT users are  also supported.

Forgive me for misleading you, Chee-Kai ... the XSLT is entirely 
behind the scenes which allows me to use it without the user's 
knowledge.  I was speaking of the flexibility with which the ODF 
"Save as..." employs an XSLT stylesheet converting the internal XML 
representation of the spreadsheet into the external UBL representation.

The interaction environment is targeted to spreadsheet users, not 
XSLT users.  There is no visibility of XSLT or XPath and I anticipate 
typical end users would only find such things difficult to understand.

>I've done away with the need for XSLT, since I believe the use of 
>modified XPaths right at the cells where the values are stored 
>behave like  laser beams pinpointing exactly where the value should 
>be transformed.  So it almost looks like a "Visual XSLT" of sort, 
>but without the need for a simple user to learn about XSLT.  But I 
>think I haven't scored 100% here either, because of the use of 
>modified XPath expression in the comment.  I hope this is the least 
>delta information needed for the user to supply and for UBLish to 
>correctly produce the desired instance.

I look forward to seeing how you've accomplished this when I can make 
the time in my schedule (the end-of-month/beginning-of-month 
obligations are in the way) to see how you've presented XPath to end users.

Thank you again for all your valuable contributions to the community!

. . . . . . . . . . Ken

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