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At 20:30 07/03/2007, Joe Krahn wrote:
>peter murray-rust wrote:
> > Thanks Brian,
> > We are clearly in almost complete agreement. Minor comments below.
> >
> > At 10:32 07/03/2007, Brian McMahon wrote:
> >> courtesy; and even, in Peter's case, efforts are made to retain
> >> them by applying sensible heuristics if content is re-ordered.
> >> I think such applications have value, but there is no requirement
> >> on them by the standard to do so, nor do I believe there should be.
> >
> > Agreed.
>
>This makes the style-sheet concept a good one. It provides pretty
>printing that can be easily customized for any purpose, and also avoids
>the need for heuristics. In the absence of a style sheet, don't bother
>to align anything. Then CIF files can be optimized for human or computer
>parsing, and everybody gets what they want. I like the idea a lot.
>
>Peter, what do you think of CIF-based style sheets? Although XSLT is
>well defined, a CIF parser can already parse CIF, so why add a new
>parser syntax?

because the stylesheet rules probably have to be expressed in a 
Turing complete or near-complete language (there have been many 
years' work here).  I - and I suspect noone else - is keen to 
reengineer XSLT functionality in CIF, probably for multiple platforms.

P.



>Joe
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Peter Murray-Rust
Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics
University of Cambridge,
Lensfield Road,  Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069