This is probably a FAQ, but I haven't found the answer. I've
been doing some background research on XSLT as a programming
language. Now I have grasped the concepts of declarative
programming, but there's one important question left: what is
the advantages of having XSLT expressed in XML syntax?
There are three main benefits.
(a) it means that XSLT re-uses all the lexical apparatus of XML, such as
entities, encodings, etc
(b) it's useful when large parts of a stylesheet are basically
boilerplate content to be added to the result document
(c) it allows transformations to take stylesheets as their input and/or
output. This is not as exotic as it seems, it's something that many
"big" XSLT applications do.
Even if we like XML, it's a quite verbose syntax for
programming. Have there been any attempts on making an
abbreviated form of XSLT
Yes, there have. For example see
http://www.pault.com/pault/prod/XSLScript
But verbosity is not necessarily a bad thing in programming. The
proportion of development time spent actually typing code is tiny.
Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael(_dot_)H(_dot_)Kay(_at_)ntlworld(_dot_)com
work: Michael(_dot_)Kay(_at_)softwareag(_dot_)com
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list