Subject: Re: Leventhal's challenge misses the point (long) From: James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 28 May 1999 18:00:17 +0700 |
Heikki Toivonen wrote: > To do any sort of "real work" transformation and styling with XSL requires > knowledge that is not different from programming skills. I disagree. I think one of the main strengths of XSLT is precisely that it allows a user with no programming skills to do many useful transformations. However this does require a proper tutorial which the XSLT spec is currently lacking. The Microsoft XSL document does quite a good job of introducing XSLT. Have a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/XSLGuide/xsl-overview.asp and in particular http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/xslguide/xsl-template.asp I can't see anything in there that is beyond the skills of somebody who can write XML+CSS. This is very typical of the sorts of transformation that arise when using XML for data. There are uses of XSLT that do require programming skills, and there are many transformations that cannot be solved with XSLT but instead require the power of a full programming language. But that doesn't imply that there aren't many useful transformations that can be done with XSLT without any programming skills. I don't claim to be an expert on what's easy for non-programmers, but I don't think that the major companies that are supporting the development of XSLT, like Microsoft, Oracle, Lotus and IBM (see Appendix D of the XSLT WD for a complete list) would be bothering with it if it was completely unuseable by non-programmers. James XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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