Re: [xsl] How Can I Reference previous XML in Subsequent Iterations?
2007-04-18 11:29:32
Chris M. wrote:
Wow. Thanks for all the help!
I'll have to digest it a bit later on, but this sure beats the sound
of crickets chirping I've had on other forums.
Someone posted in another thread that "XSLT is dead," but I think that
it is really just not being explained/evangelized well enough (which
is what is making XML in general such a tough sell).
Hmm, for about eight years I have been working with XML and related
technologies. There are currently very few tools around there,
especially in the enterprise market, that ignore XML. With XSLT, more
and more enterprise products and frameworks (BEA, SAP, StreamServe,
Cocoon, MS BizTalk, .NET, Java), end-user products (MS Word, OpenOffice,
Adobe) and browsers (IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari) all offer some
kind of XSLT support.
With XSLT 2.0, the story is a bit different, but it's only an official
recommendation since January 2007, so you should give it a couple of
more months/years.
People like me, who have a solid background in computer science,
aren't very common. I can hunt down information and sort through
chaff, but your average Web designer can't do this as easily. It can
take them years to build up a reference schema, so to speak, and
XML/XSL is presented as a completely new "paradigm," with no
connection to their known schema. As has been pointed out, the
thinking needs to be different. XSLT starts with the assumption that
the learner has a fairly solid understanding of XML first (especially
namespaces -Excedrin Headache #2), which is a brick wall barrier to
many people who would otherwise enthusiastically embrace the
advantages of XSLT.
I'm no XSLT expert, but I have already developed a site that does
automatic transforms for WML 1, WML 2 or XHTML, depending upon the
user agent. When I show this to people who do regular Web sites, their
jaws drop. They would LOVE to be able to do it. However, when I start
explaining how I do it, they get all googly-eyed and start snoring.
The problem is to bring XML to the Proletariat. Not sure how this is
best handled. W3schools has a fairly good tutorial, but even that is
fairly light on the "big picture."
Interesting. I don't believe that XSLT, nor XML is catered for the
'Proletariat'. I hope it will remain in the area of professionals for a
long time to come (unfortunately, this is not true anymore for several
years now, considering the garbage coming out from XML-esque programs
and tools that are not even close to being well-formed etc, let alone
the XML-like programming in PHP, Perl etc, were string-concatenation and
string-comparison are the main tools for working with XML, emphasizing
that too many non-pros are now transforming the XML Lake into XML Moors).
It is true that it helps if you understand XML quite well before
tackling languages and tools that work with XML. But XML, though easy to
learn and use, can be harder to master thoroughly (years, even for
professionals). Putting XML+Namespaces, XML Schema, DOM, the XML Infoset
model and (yes we still need it) DTD to the picture and people get
easily lost. You can do without them, but if you want to master XSLT,
it'll help you a great deal if you have an above-average understanding
of these techniques.
No, I don't see a world where some HTML designer starts out with using
XSLT. XSLT is an easy to learn language if you get the right guide (just
hire Michael Kay, Wendell Piez, Jeni Tennison, David Carlisle, M David
Peterson, Andrew Welch or Dimitri Novatchev (not sure they are all
available, but I consider there teaching skills and topic understanding
very high, sorry if I forgot about someone)), but it is about *data*
transformation, which is much more abstract (and boring) than visual
display (for which you can use HTML, XSL-FO, SVG or just Adobe
Photoshop). A graphic designer should do what (s)he is best at: design
graphically.
XSLT is for the same kind of people that nowadays connect disparate data
systems, exchange data, transform from format X to format Y, setup data
transformation frameworks and, possibly, create some master stylesheets
and let designers provide their (easy and restricted!) stylesheets which
run together. XSLT is a bit like the game Go. It is very simple and easy
at start, but the further you get, you find that it is extremely
powerful and it will take you a long time to find the depth of the
rabbit hole.
Cheers,
-- Abel Braaksma
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