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RE: XSL - Transforming 2 XSL stylesheets from 1 XML file

2005-05-05 09:03:00


    Andrew> fantasy land when they conceived the xml-stylesheet PI and
    Andrew> its media type attribute - it was a bit naïve to expect
    Andrew> any mobile device to look for the PI with a 'handheld'
    Andrew> media type, perform the transformation itself, and then
    Andrew> get this univeral 'handheld' markup back that looks great
    Andrew> on all mobile devices....

Why is this naive? If a handheld device is going to the 
trouble of looking up an xml-stylesheet PI and performing the 
transformation, then it's trivial (compared with the step of 
performing the
transformation) to select the right one.

It's naïve because it's grouping all mobile devices under the one handheld 
banner - if you can only specify one stylesheet for all handheld devices in the 
world then the markup it generates will have to be pretty generic.  It's just 
not feasible.


    Andrew> The whole idea of associating a stylesheet with an XML
    Andrew> document by hard-coding it into the XML is wrong

It certainly isn't wrong - it's an excellent idea, enabling 
clients to offload work from busy servers

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.
 
    Andrew> it's a practice best avoided.

This is harder to argue against, given the lamentable state 
of existing implementations.

Blame the spec, not the implementations, it was a bad idea from start (it is 
possible that JC couldn't see into the future and misjudged some things).

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