[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSL: Why?
"Simon St.Laurent" wrote: > I'm writing a chapter on styles - just a brief overview, since the book > doesn't deal with generic presentation issues very much - and I've come to > something of an impasse. > > I can't really see where XSL fits usefully into the XML developer's tool > kit. I thought it was more capable than CSS, until I read the CSS2 spec in > depth and figured it had moved from covering 70% of design needs to > something more like 90-95%. I'm finding it very hard to justify using XSL > rather than CSS for most of the situations I'm describing. > > This may be the result of my background in Web development, rather than > SGML, but I can't see what's so intrinsically interesting about using a > transformative rather than a descriptive style language that it rates a > competing spec and has many people (notably Peter Flynn on XML-L a while > back) waiting for XSL rather than working with CSS now. > > Would anyone care to evangelize XSL to a rather confused and somewhat > dispirited XML evangelist? (I wish I had Frank Boumphrey's book now...) If you think that the entire future of the internet rests upon the lowest common denominator technology of a web browser, then you are probably right that there is no reason why XSL would ever be more useful than CSS. I in particular have a product I have been working on that I cannot speak too much of at the moment which could be considered as a technology replacement for much of the functionality of a web browser and does much much more. XML plays a very large role in the application as it is currently written in Java and we do not want our content bound to something as inflexible as Java object serialization in case we want to write our application in a different language at a different date. XSL at the moment does not play any currently implemented role, but I forsee that it will be something we actively support as separating abstract content from presentation content I believe will become a mainstay of application frameworks for the web. The best thing we have right now that I have seen is Cold Fusion. This primarily is only a server-side solution and costs a lot of money. XSL's strength I feel will be on the client side as all that a web server will need to do is present easy to construct XML content at the server level, and then fetch a stylesheet for the particular user (which could be customized via some sort of profile). The content viewer which may be an HTML browser then can do all of this processing on the client machine rather than bog down the server with complicated content presentation processing. The original idea of Java (which I still fervently believe in) is that its strength is on the client since you can transfer a lot of the processing from the server to the client in a distributed fashion (means you need to spend less on servers and programmer salaries to manage those servers). XSL I believe also will fit into this concept as it will reduce overall business costs of running an up to date, dynamic, and attractive web site by transferring a lot of the processing to the client (without the needs of JavaScript) as well as open the door to many new kinds of internet content viewing software. Tyler 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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