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Re: SS Scripting vs XSL

• Subject: Re: SS Scripting vs XSL
• From: Francis Norton <francis@r...>
• Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 18:14:24 +0000
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <p05101028b83fbeb5101d@[192.168.1.17]>
• Reply-to: francis@r...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2

Hi Jim,

jimtronic wrote:

 > I'm curious ... What is the benefit of using XSL when you could parse 
 > and display XML using a server side scripting language like jsp or
 > php?

JSPs are good for generating HTML on a smarter mail-merge model (the 
XSLT people call it the "pull" model). And obviously they're great for 
when you need to get a lot of general-purpose programming language 
features, like talking to the operating system.

XSLT has at has advantages in at least two cases. The first is any case 
where you have a "push" transform - where you want the structure of the 
incoming data to drive the construction of the output. XSLT allows you 
to define templates which match particular incoming patterns and process 
them. The second is that XSLT programs are themselves XML, and therefore 
appropriate input or output for XSLT. Yesterday I helped some colleagues 
write a two-phase transform for a tricky requirement. I haven't tried 
this in JSP but it doesn't look like something I'd want to try.


Francis.

• References:
  • SS Scripting vs XSL
    • From: jimtronic <jim@n...>

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