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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] transformations
 I'm pondering the state of transformations in XML while preparing a presentation about 'transformations as a way of life', and I'm coming to the conclusion that we've oversold a few tools to the detriment of other possibilities. One of the finest moments I've seen on any XML-related mailing lists was James Clark's discussion of the limitations of XSLT on XSL-list over a year ago: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/archive/msg04455.html It's definitely best to read the whole message, but if you're in a hurry, he notes that XSLT is better at going from more structured data to less structured data, better at structure-based transformation than content-based transformation, and better at trees than graphs. I was also pleased to see him say "I would never claim that XSLT is the one true transformation language for XML." This wisdom doesn't seem to have percolated very far, however, since I've edited a number of books which hadn't seemed to notice and constantly find conversation where transformations are presented starkly as a choice between XSLT and DOM processing, with one choice or the other given preference. When I hear these discussions, I sometimes interject with suggestions about SAX filters, architectural forms, Omnimark, and even (gasp) regular expressions. Lately I've been thinking about using RDF to map relationships among vocabularies, though mostly I've got some pictures rather than RDF documents. All of these possibilities have merit, and all of them receive some use in XML processing. For some reason, however, these ideas haven't really picked up mindshare. I find it somewhat ironic that 'style sheets' are now proposed as a tool for large-scale conversions during conversations between businesses, and even that a technology whose roots were in Dynamic HTML has grown into a primary interface for manipulating XML documents. These tools have done extraordinarily well in solving a lot of problems, but there are large classes of problems they solve inefficiently at best, some of which are very very simple. My favorite case is simple translation of element names, where markup needs to be presented to the user in his or her native language. While many technologies are capable of doing this, making it work is pretty tricky when multiple languages are involved. There's no unifying dictionary mechanism for querying 'is-a' relationships by language keys. Instead, there are a lot of different ways to transform one element to another and preserve the content along the way. Jonathan Borden showed off some very cool work at XMLDevCon 2000 which got me thinking about these issues more deeply. I've been pondering the RDF modeling simply because it seems the easiest to manage and extend over the long term, but it's still just pondering at this point. I'm not sure these are problems we can solve any time soon, or easily, but it's interesting to see that we may just be getting started. Simon St.Laurent XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. XHTML: Migrating Toward XML http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books 
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