At 12:03 PM 5/5/2005, Andrew wrote:
It certainly is wrong - it's an awful idea. Offloading work from the
server to the client is a good idea (but still debatable), but achieving
that through embedding links to the stylesheet in the XML is just wrong -
it ties that XML to that stylesheet forever more. It's hardly been a
success story has it? What's needed is a far more flexible approach.
Actually this is a "glass half-empty" argument (or quarter-empty or
whatever :-). While <?xml-stylesheet?> doesn't hold up enough to wear
outdoors (sorry to switch metaphors on you), it's worth recalling that
without it browsers would have had no officially-sanctioned or even
partially-portable way to invoke XSLT to run in the client, if for no one
other than us developer-types. (A single PI is easy to drop in there,
avoiding all script-fussiness.) Given that XSLT 1.0 was designed with the
client in mind (we can leave aside the debate over where a transformation
layer "belongs"), not only was it politically and culturally a Good Thing
that we have had (more or less sort of) a single way to do this -- arguably
it helped "save face" while XML/XSLT went on to prove just how valuable and
useful it is in general and not just on the client.
I use them on my local system, but not always, and I expect them to break
frequently (so it's nice the thing is as innocuous as a PI); nor to I rely
on them for any kind of "publication".
I agree that long-term we're going to need stronger and better standards
for the client, or client-side XSLT is just not going to prove feasible
outside of intranets. A many-to-many relation between source documents and
stylesheets is part of the whole idea.
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
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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