No, I am not trolling. I've spent time reading the spec. I
see that it is just another scripting language with very
little left of the good things contained in the original idea of XSLT.
Well, these comments are more useful than your original one-line troll,
but they still fall short of a critique that one can respond to
meaningfully.
There were achievements and flaws in XSLT 1.0. An elegant
tool to manipulate XML infosets is an achievement.
Inconsistencies in the syntax of both XPath and XSLT ar flaws.
Instead of fixing flaws and securing achievements by producing a
probably source-incompatible but more consistent and easy to
use version 2, the committee has developed a specification
which is beyond my personal capabilities to learn and use.
Which specific facilities do you consider to be too difficult to learn
and use? Which things would you have left out, or designed differently?
Asserting that you could do a better job yourself in half the time is
all very well, but you need to demonstrate how.
Do remember that a language specification is not designed as a tutorial.
I'm afraid you know more about your "personal capabilities" than I do.
My own belief is that we have made some very large classes of problem
much easier to tackle than they were before, notably string
manipulation, date manipulation, and grouping, and that many people who
found XSLT 1.0 too difficult will find XSLT 2.0 much easier.
It can be my fault, but I don't see what can be made easier or
at least with comparable easiness using XSLT 2.0 than with
any of other well-developed scripting languages currently
widely deployed.
If you find DOM-level navigational programming easy, then you're welcome
to it.
Michael Kay
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list