Re: A would-be user's first XSL experience (long)

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Paul Prescod wrote:

> "Silence," wrote Melville, "is the only Voice of God." The assertion,
> like its subject, cuts both ways, negating and affirming, implying both
> absence and presence, offering us a choice; it's a line that the Society
> of American Atheists could put on its letterhead and the Society of
> Friends could silently endorse while waiting to be moved by the spirit
> to speak. - Listening for Silence by Mark Slouka, Apr. 1999, Harper's

> The better way to do this is with Java on the client side with a "stop"
> button. As I said before, if someone wants to donate the browser-portable
> Javascript code for talking to Java applets then I'll be glad to write the
> small wrapper class that turns XT into an applet.
 

	With that, I'd like to volunteer out in public (I'd responded
privately to Todd about something similar to this) to help out.  I'll do
the JavaScript that interacts with an applet front end for XT.

	You can even write it so that when the next XSLT draft or rec
comes out, the XT side could just be dropped in.

	I also agree that bogging down some good hearted persons server
ain't going to make people love/hate (well maybe hate) XSL, nor will
some web-based front-end to an XSL tool be the end-all of transformation
languages.

	[apologies for cut-and-pasting your e-mail, Paul]

	H
-----------------------------------------
G. Hussain Chinoy
hussain@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chief Information Architect, CEO
Granularity Information Architecture, Inc.
http://www.granularity.com/



> Todd Fahrner wrote:
> > 
> 
> I have no problem with making such a toy front end. But you are promoting
> it as the feature that will Save XSL. It is not. It is just a useful tool
> that it is nice to have available.
... 
> 
> IE5 is a fine way to get the general feel for a few-months old iteration
> of XSL.
> 
> I didn't say that your toy (your word) would not be worth the development
> effort. I even volunteered to help develop it. I claimed, rather, that it
> doesn't address any serious usability issue *with XSL* that will affect
> XSL's accessibility or popularity *once deployed*. If XSL goes to REC for
> six months and there are no good user interfaces for it then that would be
> the appropriate time to decry the terrible usability of XSL user
> interfaces.
> 
> Anyhow, RUWF and an XSL runner are very different beasts. The latter can
> cause infinite loops which tend to take a long time to complete even on
> very fast machines. If you get a few novices using the back button and
> resubmitting an infinitely-looping script over and over again you can
> easily [expletive deleted] up a bunch of your server capacity -- even if you put limits
> on it.
> 
> -- 
>  Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
>  http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco
> 
> 
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
> 




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