[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Questioning XSL
Miles Sabin wrote: > > No, but do they have to be part of the *language*? > > Wouldn't a hypothetical DOM level X with direct support > for XSL style queries not address most of these issues? I asked for: > XSL's optimized mix of "polymorphic dispatch", pattern > matching and convenient template description. You've given me only pattern matching. In JavaScript, Python or Perl I would have to write the polymorphic dispatch engine myself and likely write my output templates in some weird non-XML syntax: make( "HTML" ) or write( "<HTML>" ) or something. I spend most of my programming time in a scripting language. I have already helped design two or three XML/SGML processing packages for that scripting language. It is my considered opinion that it is *not* the same unless the scripting language is designed from the ground up to handle XML: (Omnimark, Balise, DSSSL). I mean it is theoretically possible that there is a language out there that just naturally fits XSL-style-processing, but it sure isn't Javascript. There is a huge amount of information in a simple rule like: <xsl:template match="B"> <BOLD><xsl:apply-templates/></BOLD> </xsl:template> The script-language equivalent would be something like: pattern = compilePattern( "B" ) function B_template( current_node ){ make_group( make_element( "BOLD", dispatch_children( current_node ))) } xsl_engine.add( pattern, B_template ) Now I fully expect to write code like this in the future. There is a Python library like this under development already. But I don't believe that this is as simple to learn as XSL because first you have to learn the intricacies of a scripting language ("oh, functions can be arguments?") and then you have to learn the intricacies of the library. You could have learned XSL directly in less time. And even so, this code is less amenable to optimization than XSL code is because you have the full dynamicity of the programming language to deal with. -- Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco Alabama's constitution is 100 years old, 300 pages long and has more than 600 amendments. Highlights include "Amendment 393: Amendment of Amendment No. 351", "Validation of Laws Regulating Court Costs in Randolph County", "Miscegenation laws", "Bingo Games in Russell County", "Suppression of dueling". - http://www.legislature.state.al.us/ALISHome.html 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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