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Re: Two recommendations: (1) Call it XSLT "program" (n

Subject: Re: Two recommendations: (1) Call it XSLT "program" (not XSLT "stylesheet"), (2) stop treating XSLT as an acronym
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 08:34:47 -0400
Re:  Two recommendations: (1) Call it XSLT "program" (n
At 2010-05-22 08:12 -0400, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
Note: In the following I am just talking about XSLT. I am not talking about XSL-FO.

But you cannot ignore that XSLT was designed and written for use with XSL-FO. The official name of XSL-FO is "XSL" and XSLT is the transformation language (T) for use with XSL-FO (XSL) = "XSLT". (I know you know this, but I wanted to underscore it for the readers of this archive).


XSLT is a programming language. It is used to create programs. Personally, I never use XSLT to perform styling. When was the last time you used XSLT to set a font color or background color?

Every day ... when I use it to set the font colour and background colour in my XSL-FO files, and when I use it to set the font colour and background colour in my HTML+CSS files.


I use CSS to do styling.

You use CSS to express what style you want, but I suspect you use XSLT to decide *which* CSS styles go *where* in your HTML+CSS results. Thus it is your XSLT that is doing the actual (verb) styling of your information.


It is unfair of you to exclude XSL-FO and include CSS in your dissertation because they both have the same role. They both are the vocabulary expressing styles, but neither of them "do styling" which is the deciding of the application of the styles to be used.

The XSLT transformation is the expression of the algorithmic application of static styles to portions of a result tree hierarchy. Whether those static styles are expressed using CSS or XSL-FO. Sounds like a stylesheet to me.

Thus, I come to my first recommendation.

RECOMMENDATION #1

When you write or talk about an XSLT document, call it a program. Don't call it a stylesheet. For example, say this: "I wrote an XSLT program to screen-scrape Yahoo Finance." Don't say this: "I wrote an XSLT stylesheet to screen-scrape Yahoo Finance."

You say "to-mah-to", I say "to-may-to".


It is regrettable that XSLT is an acronym standing for XML _Stylesheet_ Language Transformations. As described above, rarely (if ever) is XSLT used for styling. Thus, the acronym is completely misleading.

Do you, Roger, use <xsl:stylesheet> or <xsl:transform> as the document element of your XSLT expressions?


If your users are wary of "stylesheets", then use <xsl:transform> as the document element and call your expression a "data transformation".

This leads to my second recommendation.

RECOMMENDATION #2

Stop treating XSLT as an acronym. It is just the name of a programming language, just as Java is the name of a programming language.

Comments?

Why even bring this up? What benefit will you realize in your day-to-day working with the technology by asking an entire community of users to change the way they talk about it? Especially after it has been in active use for over 12 years. Wouldn't you be damaging the extensive collateral that has built up over all this time if you start deprecating (or even denigrating indirectly by deprecating) "XSLT stylesheets"?


XSLT and XQuery are templating and programming languages with XML as a first-class data construct in the syntax of the language, and awareness of hierarchy as a semantic of the data structures, unlike other programming languages where XML is accessed only through a veil of subroutine calls. To me *that* is the distinction of XSLT/XQuery that makes it useful both for styling (deciding which styles go where in a result hierarchy of information and their appearances) and structured data programming (creating new hierarchies of information from old hierarchies of information).

I don't think the two concepts of styling and programming can be untwined in these languages. It is simply the power of these languages that allow you to do both. So why go to the effort to try and do so? I'm worried posts like this (and a few others you have thrown out to the group) are potentially damaging to an industry that many of us are and have been relying on for so long because lay people who are shopping around for technology will be left with the impression that something is wrong when nothing is wrong.

If it ain't broke, why fix it?

If it is powerful enough to do two perceived things, why hide one under a blanket? Why not underscore the power of it to address the problems of people who need stylesheets and the people who need data transformations?

I hope this is considered useful.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

--
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G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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