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Re: Anyone wanna speculate about what this means?

• To: "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 23:03:18 -0800
• Organization: The Tumeric Partnership
• References: <B885BEDCB3664E4AB1C72F1D85CB29F804B7C903@R...> <0a2301c2d63d$04595e30$6501a8c0@TUMERIC01> <oprkp2cgzbezizxn@s...>
• Reply-to: "Charles White" <chuck@t...>

>
> I tend to agree with Dare here.  XSLT requires some mental gymnastics that
> are difficult for ordinary procedural programmers (such as moi, to be
> honest) to get used to.  I used to think I was just particularly dumb on
> this score, but I've heard from plenty of XML newbies (and, ahem, a few
> veterans with a couple of beers under their belt) who just run into a
brick
> wall when they try to do something non-trivial in XSLT.  I'm thinking that
> I think my condition may be fairly widespread, and for what it's worth,
> XQuery's approach seems much more easily understandable to at least this
> one XSLT-challenged person.

Well, let me state flat out that I really like the way XQuery looks. I have
to admit that it has an appeal that I can't quite put my finger on. I've
only tested it on a local personal edition of Ipedo, but it seems easy to
use so far, but I have to assume that's partly because I know XPath, v1 and
v2.

I'm curious to know why you find XQuery's approach more understandable, and
I mean this out of genuine curiosity, not in some smart-assed way. I see
both languages as being heavily dependent on the ability to understand how
to manipulate XPath expressions, so I would think if you grok one you'd grok
the other.

>
> That's not to say that there's  anything wrong with XSLT, just that having
> a roughly equivalent technology that is more approachable by a
> conventionally trained developer (XQuery for SQL folks, a Javascript or X#
> with built in XML support for procedural folks, whatever) might indeed
make
> XML more popular as a data model/syntax to be exposed rather than hidden
> behind wizards and GUIs.
>

The link Dare provided to the XML Javascript extension was very interesting.
I'll be interested to see if Bosworth talks about that in his next
installment. It seemed that's where he was going with the preceding article,
then he came back around into overview mode. I wish I had a little more time
to go over the material -- maybe later.

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...>
  • Re: Anyone wanna speculate about what this means?
    • From: "Charles White" <chuck@t...>
  • Re: Anyone wanna speculate about what this means?
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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