RE: XSL controversy

[Maxime Levesque]
>
>
>  With DOM, you can do anything that a programming language
>let's you do with a tree structure, so there probably exists 'funky'
>transformations that will break the teeth of an XSL'er, but
>I think that they are only of academic interrest (all languages
>that have DOM implementations are turing complete, and so is XSL,
>so the question of wether one is more 'powerfull' than the other
>is not the right one).

I do electronic publishing with XML/SGML for a living and
in my experience "funky" transformations are the norm rather than the
exception. I can assure you that they are more than
just of academic interest.

The fact that XSL is turing complete is the thing that
is of academic interest quite frankly. If it take pages upon
pages of XSL and a brain the size of James Clark's to do something
that Python plus a normal brain can do in two lines, it makes
engineering sense to stick with Python!

I am not anti XSL. I am a fan of declarative syntaxes as
time savers in many domains - but lets be realistic
folks...


<Sean uri="http://www.digitome.com/sean.html">
Developers Day co-Chair WWW9, April 2000, Amsterdam
<uri>http://www.www9.org</uri>
</Sean>



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