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
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Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
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