Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1999-04-08
2002-10-08
Amsbury, Wayne (Department: 2171)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06463440
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer system, and deals more particularly with a method, system, and computer-readable code for retrieving style sheets from a directory or other repository, based upon partial characteristic matching. Characteristics are associated with style sheets, and retrieval is accomplished by specifiying a pattern which includes one or more of the characteristics. Preferably, the style sheet characteristcs are stored as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) objects in an LDAP directory.
2. Description of the Related Art
A “style sheet” is a specification of a style that is to be used when presenting a document. The style specification includes information such as the font and margins to be used, the formatting layout, and other types of information that indicate how the presented document should appear. Style sheets can be used for many types of presentation of a document, including printing the document, displaying it on a video display, processing the document by a speech synthesizer, etc. Consequently, style sheets may also be utilized to describe transformations from one document type to another (e.g. from MathML to HTML) or as filters which describe transformations to reduce the amount of content while maintaining the original document type.
One type of style sheet is an XSL Style Sheet. XSL Style Sheets are style sheets specified in XSL, which is a particular style sheet language. “XSL” is an acronym for “Extensible Stylesheet Language”. An XSL Style Sheet specifies how an XML document is to be transformed for presentation, resulting in a different document which may or may not maintain the original document type. “XML” is an acronym for “Extensible Markup Language, and is a trademark of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. XML is a standardized formatting notation, created for structured document interchange on the World Wide Web (hereinafter, “Web”). (Refer to “Extensible Markup Language (XML), W3C Recommendation Feb. 10, 1998” which is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210, for more information on XML; and to “Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), Version 1.0, World Wide Web Consortium Working Draft Dec. 16, 1998”, hereinafter “XSL Specification”, which is available on the Web at http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl, for more information on XSL.)
Style sheets include “template rule” constructs, which define an input pattern and a template (also known as an “action”) to use in creating an output result tree fragment. When applying a style sheet, the patterns in the templates are matched against the syntax of the source document. When a match is found with the template pattern, an output document fragment is created according to the actions specified in the template (which may include processing additional elements in the source document beyond the matching element). The source document is parsed recursively, until no more matching patterns are found. The resulting document fragments are then aggregated to yield a complete output document. (For more information on this process, refer to section 2, “Tree Construction”, in the XSL Specification.) It is this template matching and substitution of different document elements according to the actions in the matching rules that enables style sheets to transform documents. (While the term “document” is used herein when discussing encoded data and application of style sheets thereto, it is to be understood that the information on which a style sheet operates may represent any type of information, and is not limited to the traditional interpretation of the word “document”. As one example, a style sheet may be used to process an encoded representation of records from a data repository which specify a company's sales data. As another example, a style sheet may be used to format employee information retrieved from a corporate database for presentation. For ease of reference, the term “document” will be used herein to refer to these diverse types of information.)
XML is emerging as a powerful methodology for representing document content, due to its ability to store data in a self-defining, portable manner. Style sheet languages such as XSL, along with their associated processors, are powerful tools for filtering data content encoded in notations such as XML, as well as for transforming documents encoded in one markup language into other markup languages (or vocabularies) such as HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or WML (Wireless Markup Language). XML documents are evolving in a manner in which style sheets are also being used to perform custom tailoring of content information. For example, style sheets may be written to search for and extract a specific subset of the information contained in the XML document. Or, a style sheet might tailor the information so that it can be delivered to a particular device, transforming the document for the characteristics of the device (such as which browser will be used to render the document, the screen size of the device, whether the screen supports color or grayscale, etc.). The need to perform this type of content tailoring is increasing rapidly as the popularity of new types of computing devices, such as pervasive computing devices, increases. Pervasive computing devices are typically small, constrained-storage devices such as “Smart Phones” or the WorkPad device from the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). (“WorkPad” is a registered trademark of IBM.) These devices are typically designed to be portable, and therefore are often connected to a network using a relatively expensive wireless connection, which may have limited bandwidth. Pervasive computing devices are often quite different from the devices an end-user might use in an office setting, such as a desktop computer. For example, the display screen on the devices may be quite small, and may not support color display, audio, etc. Thus, XML documents which were originally created with the expectation that the document would be rendered on a full-function desktop computer may contain a significant amount of content that cannot be presented to the user of the smaller, low-end device. In fact, when a document includes large objects such as image, video, or audio files, it is quite possible that the low-end device will not have sufficient storage space to even receive the document. In the current art, the style sheet that is to be used for transforming a document is specified statically, using various techniques such as an in-line style sheet encoded within a document, or an externally-stored style sheet that is referenced from a document using a processing instruction. As more and more new types of computing devices are developed, the less likely it will be that a document content developer will be able to predict the environment in which his document will be rendered and the more likely it will be that the document will contain content inappropriate for users having a wide variety of computing devices, such that a statically-specified style sheet is no longer adequate.
In view of this situation, it would be desirable to dynamically select one or more style sheets that tailor a document for presentation in a specific target environment. For pervasive computing devices, it will often be useful to filter audio data out of the document, to perform transcoding processes to replace full-color images with grayscale images, etc. These types of transformations would adapt the content to the device's physical capabilities, as well as greatly reduce the size of the document (thereby reducing the cost of transmitting the document, and increasing the likelihood that sufficient storage space will be available for receiving the document). In addition to tailoring a document for the characteristics of the device, it would also be beneficial to determine that a specific browser is running on the device, and transform the document for rendering by that browser when necessary. For example, a document encoded in a d
Hind John R.
Lection David Bruce
Tidwell, II Leonard Douglas
Topol Brad B.
Wesley Ajamu A.
Amsbury Wayne
Doubet Marcia L.
International Business Machines - Corporation
Ray-Yarletts Jeanine S.
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