I wasn't (quite :-) present at the creation either, but I do think
Jay rather overstates the point: it's not really true that "no one
perceived much need for string manipulation". Rather, it was
envisioned that there'd be other tools (Perl, anyone?) better suited
to that. XSLT 1.0 was supposed to be a clean, lean and mean subset
and optimization of *some* of the things that made its predecessor,
DSSSL, so powerful, while fixing those things about DSSSL (the
syntax) that made it impossible for most people.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wasn't there for the earliest days, but I've been fiddling with XSL
since early 2000 (when I worked with Jeremy Richman at Interleaf) and have
been using it heavily for the last 15 months. Back then, I got the
impression that people thought XSLT would be one tool in a chain and that
other tools would likely be used for processing both before and after the
XSLT stage. I suppose I should have been more explicit when I wrote that "
no one
perceived much need for string manipulation" and wrote that "no one
perceived much need for string manipulation in XSLT".
I think human nature naturally reaches for a one-tool approach, so XSLT
has gotten quite a bit of pressure to do more things. And now (the draft
of) XSLT 2.0 has much stronger string manipulation and new regular
expression abilities and grouping-centric instructions such as
for-each-group.
(My apologies for the spam tag in my earlier post, by the way. Our idiot
spam detector both wrongly tags things that aren't spam and doesn't tag
many things that are spam. I'd rather do without it, but that's not my
choice.)
Jay Bryant
Bryant Communication Services
(presently consulting at Synergistic Solution Technologies)
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