[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSLT Hello World
On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 01:20:17AM +0000, Ihe Onwuka scripsit: > How much do I have to know about a car and it's design if I just want > to drive it to work and back? I don't think that's an apposite analogy. XSLT is a declarative tree-transformation language _for XML trees_; it's completely embedded in the XML ecology's design decisions. It has meaning only in an XML environment. Why on earth would anyone even think to create a language that specialized? (Never mind a declarative language that gets its type model and data structures from *different* other things also embedded in the XML ecology!) It's a basic result of systems theory that the solution has to be at least as complex as the problem; has to be able to generate at least as much variety. XML is there to solve a really difficult, complex problem about how to represent arbitrary data structures in a human and machine readable way for any human language. XSLT has to be able to manipulate all of XML. (Even if we don't usually even *notice* all of XML.) A vehicle has to manage, somehow, thrust, drag, support for its mass, and at most three axises of control inputs. That's a much less complex problem that properly exists in a much less complex domain of solutions. Any given problem to which XML is applied -- some specific web site, some specific document representation, and so on -- is necessarily less complex than all of XML, too. XSLT is not; it's got to deal with all of XML and at least some of XML's environment. (xsl:result-document, static-base-uri(), etc.) The idea that pseudo-function node-tests are confusing, well, if you don't know what nodes are (or that there are nodes!), yes, sure. Can we possibly get around some requirement for specialized knowledge? Not in the XML problem space, no, we can't. The problem is too complex to have a simpler solution. If we want something that works, which is able to do the job, we've got a requirement to handle a lot of complexity and that puts a lower limit on how simple things can be. -- Graydon, who thinks XML and XSLT are astonishingly simple for the problem they happen to solve
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