[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Venting
<delurk> <sfx type="sigh" tone="pained"/> Is there anyone who is still undecided on the issue? OF THOSE, is there anyone who thinks further discussion will help them decide? If not, move to close debate. My personal opinion, which I will state once and not debate, goes with the "don't break it up" school. If we do, I despair of the presentation language ever being implemented. I think it's absolutely essential, in the long run, that some better alternative to HTML be developed, and the FO set is the best option currently on the table. If folks want to provide a transformation-language engine separately, and advertise it as "fully compliant with the XSL transformation language", that's fine, and easily marketable as such. Any customer clueful enough to understand why this is a good thing will understand that phrase. If folks want to spin off a more general transcoding language, then lobby to fold it back into XSL, that's a fine idea and I encourage you to do so. But that's outside the scope of XSL as such; XSL has explicitly stated its intent to handle the most common 90% (or whatever the figure was) of transformations for presentation. The fact that it's useful for general transcoding is a free bonus... and the fact that the FO's are lagging so far behind is an undesirable artifact of the development process, NOT (as far as I know) a statement of direction. The mark of a good tool is that it can be productively used for things its designers never intended. By that measure, it's clear that XSL is (going to be) a good tool. But it's not always appropriate to redesign the tool to better suit these incidental uses, and when you do, you have to be _very_ careful not to make it too complex, or too expensive, for its original task. </delurk> ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research Unless stated otherwise, all opinions are solely those of the author. XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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