Re: XSLT vs Perl

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 09:35:09PM +0400, David Tolpin wrote:
> In my opinion, validation of constructed elements is not a good thing
> because it does not serve to construct the result of transformation, but
> only to mark the result as valid or not; validation can be performed
> at subsequent processing steps without any loss in expressive power.

I disagree.

There is a point behind validation of the output.  With XSLT,
misbehaving stylesheets (or malformed input) can produce bizarre output
that is quite tricky to debug.  It is an art, quite unlike the usual art
of debugging.

Validating the output as it is generated makes it easier for a
stylesheet engine to identify precisely where input/templates are
misbehaving.  This feature makes it much closer to the 'error on line X'
form of debugging most of us are familiar with.

That said, I do not think this needs to be a *language* feature.
Especially when it mandates one schema language to the exclusion of all
others.  This kind of feature should be left to implementors to figure
out, not language designers to mandate.

Z.


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