Re: Microsoft extensions to XSL

Subject: Re: Microsoft extensions to XSL
From: James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 05:43:40 +0000
Flow Simulation wrote:

> To be the end-all solution to many things it needs an "escape to scripting language"
> as was originally proposed.   If you don't have it I think you get another 4GL development
> tool which drops you off a cliff-edge when you are 95 percent there.

I agree that without script there will always be cases that you can't
handle, and I agree it's a bad if you can't use XSL as part of a
solution if XSL can handle 95% of what you need.  But I don't think it
follows that you need an "escape to scripting language".  I find one of
the most interesting things in Microsoft's beta to be the way they have
integrated it into the DOM.  They give you a DOM method on a node that
takes a DOM node containing the xsl:stylesheet element, and returns the
XML that results from transforming the tree rooted at that node using
that stylesheet.  (Another nice feature is that their DOM allows you to
use XSL patterns to navigate the tree.) This gives you a clean way to
use script with XSL while keeping things nicely modular.  I think you
would need a bit more that Microsoft has at the moment: for example, it
would be very desirable to be able to get the result of the transform as
a DOM tree or through something like a SAX DocumentHandler.

James
(speaking for myself not the XSL WG)



 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


Current Thread