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Re: More XSL Discussion

Subject: Re: More XSL Discussion
From: "Michael Kay" <M.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 12:28:55 -0000
michael kay xsl group discussions
Jeremie Miller:

>How does anyone feel about some of the other things I've proposed?

I don't feel you've got all the answers right, but I do think you are
battling with some very real problems in the current spec.

In my view the use of pseudo-HTML style tags in the action part of XSL rules
is a mistake, for several reasons:

- it imposes a requirement that the start and end tags be balanced. This is
extremely restrictive: for example if you have two patterns, one for the
first element of a group and the other for the last element in a group, you
cannot generate a opening <UL> tag in the first and a closing </UL> in the
second. You can solve that with CDATA, or it could be solved by a new XSL
pattern that matches the whole group rather than the first or last element,
but unless you greatly extend the pattern matching capability (e.g. to
detect a group consisting of a <HEAD> element followed by a sequence of
<PARA> and <FIGURE> elements) it will always be restrictive.

- it means that the DTD for XSL is closely tied to the DTD for HTML, and
since the latter is full of vendor extensions, the former will be as well.

- it creates a superficial impression of a single seamless language, but the
impression is only skin-deep: there are actually two separate languages, the
core XSL rule/pattern/action language and the embedded HTML rendition
language. I think you would get better usability, extensibility, etc, if the
difference between the two were explicit and obvious rather than being
papered over.

Mike Kay, ICL


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