Re: Language is not markup and markup is not language.

[Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx]

Hi Lef.

I'm sure there are better people to comment on this than myself, so I can
only really give my view on this....

Strictly speaking all XSL is XML, but I think I understand what you mean,
in asking why aren't XSL patterns marked up as elements... if I've read you
wrong please correct me.

I think perhaps that at some point you have to balance what you want to
access as nodes, and verbosity. An issue of granularity really. To
represent patterns and expressions in markup would give you an extra step
in granularity, but probably up the verbosity of XSL mark-up by an order of
magnitude. So you have to look at what you'd get for what you'd be paying.

There's also the issue of human readability. This is always going to be a
subjective issue, but personaly I feel that XSL has it about right, going
as far as it can it marking-up the description while still being human
readable. I think that if pattern matching where marked-up as elements
rather than simply being attribute content then we'd be looking at a
machine language, rather than a human editable stylsheet.

I'm sure others will have another take on this. James Clark edited the XSLT
draft, so his opinion on the matter might be worth noting if he has one.

Cheers

     Guy.






xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 05/07/99 04:46:52 PM

To:   xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc:    (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID)
Subject:  Re: Language is not markup and markup is not language.




please excuse newbie question...
> implimnetation is that the very fact that XSL is XML means that it can be
> treated as data, transformed, pointed into, queried, split into sub-trees
> etc etc. It's for these reasons that XSL is in the form of XML, and that
> the general drive is toward all XML related technologies being described
in
> XML.
Is there some reason that patterns and expressions are not represented in
xml wherease much of the rest of the languag is?
cheers!lef


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