RE: First working draft of XSL

The original XSL submission used XML for the patterns.  However, the new XSL
pattern syntax is much more concise and easier to read than an XML based
pattern syntax.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Mark_Overton@xxxxxxxxx [SMTP:Mark_Overton@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent:	Tuesday, August 18, 1998 10:30 AM
> To:	xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:	Re: First working draft of XSL
> 
> My first thought is this:
> Why did they not use XML for the structure of the patterns, etc.
> 
> For example,
> Here is a rule example from the new spec
> <xsl:template match="book[excerpt]/author[attribute(degree)]">
> ...
> </xsl:template>
> 
> This could have been something like:
> <xsl:template>
>      <match>
>           <element type="book">
>                <element type="excerpt"/>
>                <target type="author>
>                     <attribute name="degree"/>
>                </target>
>           </type>
>      </match>
> <action>
>   ...
> </action>
> </xsl:template>
> 
> This way the xsl processor could read the stylesheet without having to
> parse all of this new syntax.  We have a great tool in XML for
> representing
> structured data so why did we have to come up with another?  Now, to read
> an XSL stylesheet I need to parse all of these new delimiters and more
> ('/'
> | '//' | '(' | ')' | '|' | '[' | ']' | ',' | '=' | '.' | '..' | '*' | '{'
> |
> '(' |, etc.......).  All of the built in functionality of my XML parser is
> of no use.  What a shame.
> 
> -Mark Overton
> 
> 
> 
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