Re: XSLT Architecture: Next Step

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Subject: Re: XSLT Architecture: Next Step
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 12:27:45 -0400

At 08:11 AM 7/3/2003, Claudio wrote:

Now, from the msgs I see on the list I see that people pretend to use XSLT for whatever they figure out (maybe also for cooking).

Unlike David, I didn't take this to be insulting ... rather, simply a kind of laconic irony. (That's okay by me. Not unlike what David is occasionally guilty of. ;-)

It's true Didier's article describes the "classical" architecture. And it's true that people are doing all kinds of other transforms than simply those that target presentation. Sometimes these work wonderfully well, sometimes it's a poor fit.

One important thing to keep in mind is that since XSLT was designed to enable targetting presentations, it is oriented towards providing for (what used to be called) "down-translations" (all necessary information is in the markup of the source; it merely needs to be mapped or cast aside). But partly since it's so good at this, people are also pushing it to to do "up-translations" as well (the stylesheet interpolates and/or infers information in the source that isn't actually directly expressed in the markup, and expresses it in the output: grouping is a good example of this). Many of the new features in the upcoming version 2.0, such as regular expressions over strings, are there to address this kind of requirement, which go beyond what the classic applications require (in theory if not always in practice).

And, since it turns out it provides a pretty good framework for side-effect-free programming in general -- if you can express the problem in terms of tree-structured inputs and outputs -- people have also been applying XSLT for all kinds of unanticipated things, sometimes quite successfully. They snuck a functional language onto our desktops and lo! it turns out to be useful.

Pretty good for a language that is supposed to be impossible to learn. :->

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Current Thread

Re: XSLT Architecture: Next Step, (continued)
- David Carlisle - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 09:40:01 -0400 (EDT)
- Agnes Kielen - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 09:57:02 -0400 (EDT)
  - Kurt Cagle - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 14:15:46 -0400 (EDT)
- Rob Rohan - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 12:00:24 -0400 (EDT)
- Wendell Piez - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 12:31:14 -0400 (EDT) <=
- Michael Kay - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 16:00:21 -0400 (EDT)
- Dimitre Novatchev - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 16:11:10 -0400 (EDT)
- David . Pawson - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 09:21:01 -0400 (EDT)
- Mark Seaborne - Thu, 3 Jul 2003 09:24:52 -0400 (EDT)

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Re: XSLT Architecture: Next S, Rob Rohan	Thread	RE: XSLT Architecture: Next S, Michael Kay
RE: XSLT Architecture: Next S, Wendell Piez	Date	RE: XSLT Architecture: Next S, Claudio Russo
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