[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SGML on the Web
On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 01:08:57PM -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote: > XML directly on the Web seems to have fallen victim to the notion that > XML needed a transformative style approach, missing the easy opportunity > that CSS provided for document display and requiring people to use XSLT. > That notion has also provided Microsoft with plenty of cover for their > (non-)approach to XML in the browser, which may have successfully kept > XML off the ordinary Web. Yes, but as you say, XML needs a transformative approach -- a way of turning an XML format into a Java Class (e.g. WSDL -> SOAP proxy). You can't do that if your only concern is document display, or your only tool is CSS. Remember that XML was meant to live outside of the web, too. > XSL ran into several challenges, though it seemed to keep going its own > way regardless. Looking at its current incarnation, it's difficult to see that XSL has successfully overcome the biggest challenges it faced. In the early days, ISTR a Scheme-like syntax. It was similar in its syntax, but vastly different in its semantics than DSSSL. This would have been bad because (1) lots of parens scare people off, and (2) it was significantly different from the DSSSL model. Then again, it may have been a straw man proposal... The other issue that XSL overcame was the XML-based "rule" syntax. XPath is *much* easier than that unfinished approach. (All I remember is that it was an unfinished straw man, with lots of "this isn't quite finished yet" edge cases.) > The XSL community seemed, from the perspective of a CSS > user, to have little interest in and much contempt for the notion of > formatting through annotation generally and CSS particularly. The > "Formatting Objects Considered Harmful" argument may not have bothered > people who considered FOs a necessary result of a transformation, but it > certainly troubled those of us who had hoped XML would encourage the > sharing of computer-interpretable information. ISTR the "FO Considerd Harmful" argument as something completely different. Michael Leventhal made the case that FO was a very inappropriate document format for the browser. Furthermore, anything that could be done with FO would be done with less effort (and less vapour) with HTML+CSS+JavaScript. I think the problem with Michael's argument was that FO wasn't intended to be rendered in a browser like HTML. Furthermore, FO was expected to be the output of some program (like an XSL transformation), rather than hand-coded. FO was designed specifically to handle print media, not the browser. Years later, it's obvious that these "problems" with FO were just a misunderstanding of the intent. It was never put forth as a verbose replacement for HTML. Overall, I think XSLT is quite successful. I'd go so far as to say that XSLT's importance is second only to XML (then again, I'm quite biased). One unexpected advantage with XSLT is that it fits well with the pipeline model of serial XML processing. Each individual transformation can be a very small, easy to write and easy to understand stylesheet. Technically, it's possible to do the same thing with a stack of SAX handlers or DOM transformations, but I'd much rather read three small stylesheets than deal with the syntactic sugar to make a SAX handler in Java/Perl/Python/etc. > On the bright side, XML has certainly found use beyond traditional Web > development, and XSLT has found plenty of use in styling (mostly > generating HTML or HTML+CSS, ironically enough) and in many other > transformation situations. I'm not so sure it's ironic, considering that one of the most popular DSSSL transformations was DocBook -> HTML/HTML+CSS. (Thanks, Norm!) Z.
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