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

Subject: Re: Language is not markup and markup is not language.
From: David LeBlanc <whisper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 11:15:08 -0700
At 10:41 AM 5/7/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi Dave.
>
>Your arguement is interesting, and personaly I would say not without
>merits, in that what you suggest might indeed be a good thing, but not
>really in place of XSLT.

Ok, what does "xslt scripting" have over a general purpose scripting
language like pearl or tcl?

>Didier is actualy working on a development pretty much exactly as you
>outline called XStyles, that you might find interesting. And has advantages
>of leaveraging previous experience, choice of scripting implimentation, and
>well, how can I say?... more directness.

Is there a URL for this?

>While I think it a *very* worthwhile and useful effort, I don't see it as
>competing necessarily with XSL as the advantage of XSL over a scripted
>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. 

Hmm... yet javascript, pearl, tcl and lisp can also be treated as data,
transformed, and pointed into. I am not at all clear on the utility of
querying a script element and I would argue that a sub-tree of a script is
semantically meaningless. What other etc. etc. did you have in mind?

>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.

Well, one point of my post, perhaps not clearly stated, is that mark up
notations are great for marking up data, but not so great for programming
language representation.

>As far as the inclusion of a script tag in XSL is concerned, I personally
>believe that it should be there (and regardless of Rec will be there),
>although I do understand the concerns that some have over this.

I agree (of course :-) )! Why not bow to the inevitable and put the script
tag in the reccommendation now? At the very least, it would make Microsoft
go to the trouble of making VB both unicode compliant and force them to
port it to Unix/Linux - and we could continue to ignore it!

>Cheers
>
>     Guy.
>

I received a private post from someone asserting that xslt's language seems
to have it's roots in "tree transformation languages". Seems to me that
most general purpose languages are pretty adept at tree manipulations - and
a host of other useful things as well.

Dave LeBlanc


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