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Re: XML support in browsers?

• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:59:22 -0400

Michael Kay wrote:
> There is no doubt that people typically either love XSLT or hate it: that's
> easily confirmed by seeing what people are tweeting. The latter category
> tend to be those who hoped they could pick it up learning by example in a
> spare couple of hours, and were disappointed to discover that the concepts
> are too deep for that to be possible, plus of course some who rejected it at
> first sight on aesthetic grounds, or who use it resentfully because they
> were told to use it in preference to their own favourite technology.

Most - not all, but most - developers who focus on the Web seem to 
regard XSLT as a pathological case of weird technology, something better 
left ignored unless there's good reason to break the glass and get into it.

Yes, of course you can use XSLT on the Web, but there's very little 
evidence that its creators paid attention to how web sites and 
applications are normally built, to the existence of a prior stylesheet 
language that's vastly easier to get started with, or to the general 
level of programming expertise historically required to build these 
applications.  It never really fit.

The funny (and frankly sad) thing to me is that the XSLT community often 
still expresses, as above, that the problem is that their technology 
just isn't appreciated enough by shallow resentful folks who just want 
to cut and paste.

Like that'll help.  It sure didn't help before.

Oh well.

Incidentally, browsers' CSS support for XML has improved a lot over the 
years too.  I should probably do another writeup sometime to catch up on 
a decade since the last time I did that in depth!

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XML support in browsers?
    • From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
  • RE: XML support in browsers?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>

• References:
  • XML support in browsers?
    • From: Dan Vint <dvint@dvint.com>
  • RE: XML support in browsers?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>
  • RE: XML support in browsers?
    • From: Dan Vint <dvint@dvint.com>
  • Re: XML support in browsers?
    • From: Robert Koberg <rob@koberg.com>
  • RE: XML support in browsers?
    • From: "Jim Tivy" <jimt@bluestream.com>
  • RE: XML support in browsers?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>