Re: The original purpose of XSL...

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> The primary uptake of
> XSL has to be in the production of renderable data within the Web browser.
> Anything else that it accomplishes is great, but if it fails in this
> purpose, people are going to feel more than a little let down.

Since I suppose I am one of the guilty parties who have dragged tex and
dsssl in to the discussion, let me say that I agree totally with the
above comment.

Although while _designing_ the language I would argue that you should
aim for a wider stage, when it comes down to final choices you may have
to trim some of the more exotic aspects for technical or political
reasons, but that is not a reason for starting off looking at the wider
picture.

Apart from anything else, given the rate at which web browsing
technology improves, if you design a language aimed at todays web
browsers, and intentionally omit features that are `only' needed by `high
end' print applications, you may find the language is not powerful enough
to control the web browsers that are in distribution by the time the
style language gets implemented.

David


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