[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: First experiences with XSL
>I've downloaded MSXSL and used it to generate HTML for a couple of document >types, successfully but with a certain amount of frustration caused by (a) >lack of diagnostics when I got things wrong, and (b) limited functionality. > >I've now implemented the same thing without XSL: I wrote an MSXML >application in Java that does a recursive walk down the document tree and >calls a registered "handler" class to process each element type [...] >I have to report: >- the element handlers looked very similar to the XSL rules >- the number of DTD-specific lines of code was identical (106 in each case!) >- it was far easier to debug >- you can do very many things that you can't do in XSL, like sorting the >children of a node according to some attribute value, or getting information >about user preferences from an external database. > >I have yet to spot any disadvantages [...] Of course, writing a program to solve the problem is more flexible than the declarative approach of writing XSL rules. This additional flexibility, though, comes at the cost of making it less accessible to non-programmers and not fitting as well into a generalized framework of declarative document description languages. Many of your complaints about msxsl seem to be with the tool, rather than the language itself. There is no reason why such a tool should not be able to give good diagnostics. I'm a real fan of domain-specific, declarative languages like XSL, but I haven't done enough XSL rule writing to see if the designers got it right. -Brent xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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