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Re: Anyone wanna speculate about what this means?

• To: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>,"Mike Champion" <mc@x...>,"XML Dev" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Anyone wanna speculate about what this means?
• From: "Charles White" <chuck@t...>
• Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 22:46:14 -0800
• Organization: The Tumeric Partnership
• References: <B885BEDCB3664E4AB1C72F1D85CB29F804B7C905@R...>
• Reply-to: "Charles White" <chuck@t...>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>


>Nobody is trying to have a religious war with you.
How do you know this?

>Mike asked a question and I gave an answer based on my experiences with
>users of XSLT both in the .NET Framework and MSXML. I'm glad that
>people like you can find the time to understand the subtle nuances of
>XSLT but for a large number of our users it is inaccessible and unfriendly.
>XQuery is a step in their direction.

Thanks for the implication that I have extra time on my hands -- I feel very
warm and fuzzy. My experience with people struggling with XSLT has been that
much of their struggle lies in XPath. If anything, XPath 2.0, upon which
XQuery is based, is more complex than the original. I do think for some
reason it's more intuitive for some people -- I suppose the introduction of
keywords goes a long way towards correcting the steep learning slope by
providing some familiar syntactical patterns, but I think only time will
tell whether people who struggle with XSLT will fare better with XQuery.

To me, XSLT and XQuery address different problem spaces. There is, in XSLT,
already a standard way for managing the presentation layer, and an installed
base of generic template libraries for getting around most of the tasks
people don't like dealing with when using XSLT.

XQuery seems to me, and maybe I'm just silly, to be geared more towards the
application layer, and it seems very well suited for that.

At the end of the day, I can't imagine we're really disagreeing that much.
It all depends on what role you envision for each language. I don't see
XQuery supplanting XSLT on the presentation layer. If you're seeing XSLT on
the application level it's because it has been found to be more powerful
than people may have first thought, and so they've discovered they can use
it there. But they'll gladly dump it for something else when something
better comes along. That something looks to be XQuery. No arguments there.

Chuck White
Author, Mastering XSLT, Sybex Books
http://www.javertising.com/webtech
http://www.tumeric.net

• References:
  • RE: Anyone wanna speculate about what this means?
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>

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