[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Weighing in on XSL / Standards
>At 10:28 -0400 23/5/99, Joshua E. Smith wrote: >- It is often argued by the expert systems guys that production-based rule >systems (or "case based reasoning") is *more* intuitive than... but >it is an article of faith in that community, and might help >to explain why the XSL camp seems to have a lot of "religion" about ease of >use. I think this is a 'straw man' argument. I have no problems with declarative vs procedural but I think the single biggest thing in the way of XSL is that its syntax is hard to use. I've been working in and studying UI design and usability for about 6 years and using tools on many platforms for about 15. The key factor in adoption is always ease of use, driven mainly by the tools. Some people may mistake the success of VB et al as being due to their using a GUI. I don't think this superficially attractive argument is the ansewr. The answer is the very simple abstract model that allows users to produce solutions. Apple's Hypercard was similarly successful for many years. In fact, in terms of widespread use by non-programmers I'd say it is the most successful tool to date (taking the percentage of people who had access to HC and chose to use it). With Hypercard, Apple introduced a carefully layered model of abstractions - people could create real systems with a very simple abstract model, but more power was available under the hood. If you accept this argument, then the future of XSL is a little scary. Apart from the syntactical difficulty of writing it in text editors (hopefully a passing phase) there is the complex abstract model. The only way I see it being a success is if the editing tools present an abstract model which is NOT actually that of XSL. Otherwise, it will remain a programming language for layout geeks (not necessarily a small niche!) :-) Andy Dent BSc MACS AACM, Software Designer, A.D. Software, Western Australia OOFILE - Database, Reports, Graphs, GUI for c++ on Mac, Unix & Windows PP2MFC - PowerPlant->MFC portability http://www.oofile.com.au/ 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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