On Wed, 2002-10-09 at 20:27, Passin, Tom wrote:
[David Carlisle]
what is the advantages of having XSLT expressed in XML syntax?
The other example is that the language, being xml is able to
be processed by xslt programs. This is in fact very common,
one can derive an xslt stylesheet as the result of an xslt transform.
Also it is sometimes useful to actually retrieve information from the
stylesheet itself. I find it very useful to embed small lookup tables
in named templates in the stylesheet. It is simple to get them using
document("") (of course you can use a key and a global variable to make
it faster and more readable). I do not think that this would be
possible - or at least understandable - for a non-xml syntax.
You can say the same for the Relax NG compact syntax (or for WikiML),
but in all the cases, if the compact and XML syntaxes are equivalent,
the argument is rather pointless since your always only a simple
translation away from the other!
And you can use the compact syntax with tools which do not support it as
long as you pass it through a pre-processor.
I think that we are paying too much attention to the syntax. That's
probably normal since the syntax is what we actually see but what's
important is just below and I see no problem to choose the syntax that
we prefer as long as it's equivalent to the XML one and as long as we
have converters.
I think that there is less risk of implementation lock-in to use such a
syntax than to rely on a specif extension for instance :-)
Eric
--
Freelance consulting and training.
http://dyomedea.com/english/
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Eric van der Vlist http://xmlfr.org http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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