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RE: XSLT Architecture: Next Step

2003-07-03 10:13:33
Ge! Now I'm more concerned of being able to hurt somebody with my words than to 
rather talk about the subject. Once more, my apologies.

Claudio.

PS: What you said about "people doing all kinds of transforms" reminds me more 
to a "middleware" approach. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com]
Sent: Jueves, 03 de Julio de 2003 01:28 p.m.
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT Architecture: Next Step


At 08:11 AM 7/3/2003, Claudio wrote:
Now, from the msgs I see on the list I see that people pretend to use XSLT 
for whatever they figure out (maybe also for cooking).

Unlike David, I didn't take this to be insulting ... rather, simply a kind 
of laconic irony. (That's okay by me. Not unlike what David is occasionally 
guilty of. ;-)

It's true Didier's article describes the "classical" architecture. And it's 
true that people are doing all kinds of other transforms than simply those 
that target presentation. Sometimes these work wonderfully well, sometimes 
it's a poor fit.

One important thing to keep in mind is that since XSLT was designed to 
enable targetting presentations, it is oriented towards providing for (what 
used to be called) "down-translations" (all necessary information is in the 
markup of the source; it merely needs to be mapped or cast aside). But 
partly since it's so good at this, people are also pushing it to to do 
"up-translations" as well (the stylesheet interpolates and/or infers 
information in the source that isn't actually directly expressed in the 
markup, and expresses it in the output: grouping is a good example of 
this). Many of the new features in the upcoming version 2.0, such as 
regular expressions over strings, are there to address this kind of 
requirement, which go beyond what the classic applications require (in 
theory if not always in practice).

And, since it turns out it provides a pretty good framework for 
side-effect-free programming in general -- if you can express the problem 
in terms of tree-structured inputs and outputs -- people have also been 
applying XSLT for all kinds of unanticipated things, sometimes quite 
successfully. They snuck a functional language onto our desktops and lo! it 
turns out to be useful.

Pretty good for a language that is supposed to be impossible to learn. :->

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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