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Re: [xsl] Two recommendations: (1) Call it XSLT "program" (not XSLT "stylesheet"), (2) stop treating XSLT as an acronym

2010-05-25 14:24:01
"Costello, Roger L." <costello(_at_)mitre(_dot_)org> writes:

Hi Folks,

Note: In the following I am just talking about XSLT. I am not talking about 
XSL-FO.

XSLT is a programming language. It is used to create programs. Personally, I 
never use XSLT to perform styling. When was the last time you used XSLT to 
set a font color or background color? I use CSS to do styling. Thus, I come 
to my first recommendation.

RECOMMENDATION #1

When you write or talk about an XSLT document, call it a program. Don't call 
it a stylesheet. For example, say this: "I wrote an XSLT program to 
screen-scrape Yahoo Finance." Don't say this: "I wrote an XSLT stylesheet to 
screen-scrape Yahoo Finance."


It is regrettable that XSLT is an acronym standing for XML _Stylesheet_ 
Language Transformations. As described above, rarely (if ever) is XSLT used 
for styling. Thus, the acronym is completely misleading. This leads to my 
second recommendation.

RECOMMENDATION #2

Stop treating XSLT as an acronym. It is just the name of a programming 
language, just as Java is the name of a programming language.

Comments?

I don't really like calling it a program. It depends on the context. How
about calling one of these programs a transformation specification instead of 
calling it a
script.

XSLT is not a general purpose language. There are sometimes reasons to
make a distinction between languages like XSLT and languages like
Haskell, say.

Kendall


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