I really take issue with the use of 'style' in the name of
XSLT. It's not
about style, it would seem. It seems more about structure.
It's essentially a
means of restructuring a document. This isn't style. I've never, as a
designer, needed to specify a wholesale alteration of
structure, as part of a style sheet.
I share your view that transformation and styling are technically quite
separate from each other, and that there is very little logic in the
fact that XSLT and XSL-FO have similar names and emanate from the same
W3C working group. It's historic: James Clark and others decided quite
rightly that the required functionality could be divided into two quite
cleanly separated parts, and the only thing they now share is a common
ancestry and a common community of developers and users.
You say that you have never needed "to specify a wholesale alteration of
structure, as part of a style sheet". That must mean that the source
documents you are working with are isomorphic with the target documents
you want to produce. It's clear from this list that the challenging XSLT
problems come when this isn't the case, for example when data has to be
rearranged, summarised, grouped, merged, and sorted.
Michael Kay
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list