Fw: XSL-T, XTL.... or XQL?

["Oren Ben-Kiki" <oren@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>Thought that the following surmation of moves with XQL migh prove
>interesting to those interested in dismembering... sorry, clarrifying and
>marketing... oops, don't know where my heads at today... clarifying and
>making more accessible XSLs two parts... Please forgive, I couldn't resist
>::puts foot in mouth::
>
>http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/1999/03/quest/index3.html


Thanks for the reference. It seems to list all the competing viewpoints -
worth looking at.

>I've maintianed for a long time now that persuit of a general purpose XML
>transformation language would be best done under the
>banner of XQL, or at least starting under XQL.


Nice try :-) Just as a hypothetical question, though: Suppose that XML was
gaining popularity during the 80s instead of the 90s, and that XQL as a way
to query/restructure/whatever XML documents was a mature solution by the
early 90s. No web, no HTML, just a standard way to represent trees in text
files, and to query and transform them to other trees - and even into
non-XML formats, mainly for printing (TeX, Rtf, PostScript, etc.).

Now comes the web and people want to "style" their XML data for it. Two
alternatives arise. Either use the existing XQL to generate some XML
formatting language - be it "HTML", "XML+CSS", "FO", or whatever; or create
a new language which combined a subset of XQL and a formatting language.

Now, it may be just me, but I don't feel that the second alternative would
have been even seriously considered, never mind actually being accepted as
the dominant solution. It is very likely that browsers would have
implemented only a subset of XQL at first, but that would have been accepted
as a necessary evil and would have been remedied in time.

So, the way I see it, the only reason we have this discussion is a
historical accident - XML arriving late at the scene.

Share & Enjoy,

    Oren Ben-Kiki


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