Re: XSL for non-programmers

[Dieter Maurer <dieter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric E. Cohen writes:
 > > I am a non-programmer who had quite an easy time with XSL. You can do a
 > > usability study on me if you like :-)
 > 
 > I will echo this. I firmly believe you can teach almost anyone basic XSL for
 > displaying, sorting, and filtering XML files. I do not think the same is
 > true for VBA, VB, JScript, VBScript, Python, OmniMark, or Supralapsarianism.
If you focus on *basic* displaying, sorting and filtering XML files,
I may, reluctantly, agree. If you allow to measure the difficulty
to get familiar with the basics of the languages for things,
they have been designed for, I disagree at least with respect to
Python and JavaScript (I do not know the other sufficiently enough).

XSL has been specifically designed for XML processing and
displaying. Thus, it would be a really bad thing, if
elementary tasks in this area would be very difficult.

Python, as an example, has been designed as a general purpose,
modular, easy to use scripting language and not for XML processing.
I think, it is very easy to learn the basics of the language,
even for non-programmers. You can do XML processing as
well (and even use XSL). Of cause, you will have some
(learning and programming) overhead, if all you need
is what is covered by XSL.

On the other hand, the FO specification is quite difficult
stuff for me, much more difficult than almost everything,
I know from Python.

- Dieter


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