Re: is it just me?

["James Tauber" <jtauber@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>i must admit that a few months ago (without
>actually trying xsl), i thought it was a natural requirement
>to say that xsl has to be in xml syntax. but now that i've
>typed something of this form:
[...]
>i'm having second thoughts.


But once you need to *generate* a stylesheet on the basis of some XML
document, you'll be glad that XSL is in XML.

Another bonus, although I haven't tried it, is you could actually have an
XSL stylesheet for displaying XSL stylesheets.

Being in XML also means you can use an XML editor (which will greatly reduce
the pain you've been experiencing). Mind you, *I* don't use one, but largely
because I'm telneting to a Unix box to edit most of the XSL.

>the whole time i'm reading the spec, i'm thinking things like
>"xsl:constant, ok, a constant.... xsl:macro, ok, a macro...
>xsl:for-each, got it....". and whenever i read xsl code, i
>have to mentally map it to mental pseudo-code that is a fraction
>of the size.


You don't have to use xsl as the namespace prefix. You could make
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl the default namespace and the result
namespace(s) the one(s) with a prefix. Then you can just type constant and
macro instead of xsl:constant and xsl:macro.

Actually the biggest problem I have (I've been doing a lot of XSL lately for
my sites) is I keep typing tempalte instead of template :-)

James
--
James Tauber / jtauber@xxxxxxxxxxx / www.jtauber.com
Associate Researcher, Electronic Commerce Network
Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia

Full-day XML Tutorial @ WWW8 : http://www8.org/

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