Why XSL?

Can someone tell me why XSL, or at least, why now?  Far be it from me to
denigrate all of the fine work which is done here and in the WG by people
much smarter than I.  And I probably just don't understand the technology
well enough.  But CSS2/ECMAScript seems to be a reasonably efficacious,
portable client-side styling mechanism.  Beyond that, I look at the
excellent DOM API and think, "Wouldn't it be better to invest the XSL
development effort into defining an open Flow Object API analogous to the
DOM?".

If it's the Scheme base of DSSSL that's the problem, then just give me a DOM
and FLOM (FLow Object Model) environment, and let me use my language of
choice to query, transform and style my XML.  Then the W3C can go off and
invent a new, special-purpose language (call it XSL), which simply exercises
the existing standard object models.  In the meantime, I'm getting useful
server-side work done in Perl/Python/VBScript/Younameit because a thousand
developers have rushed in to support DOM/FLOM.  As it is my options are
limited while I await the market's verdict on XSL.

Your comments/flames would be appreciated.

Jack Fitzpatrick
ADP/Autosource
Milwaukie, OR
(503) 786-3114


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