RE: XSL controversy

["Maxime Levesque" <maximel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  With DOM, you can do anything that a programming language
let's you do with a tree structure, so there probably exists 'funky'
transformations that will break the teeth of an XSL'er, but
I think that they are only of academic interrest (all languages
that have DOM implementations are turing complete, and so is XSL,
so the question of wether one is more 'powerfull' than the other
is not the right one).


  XSL offers much higher level constructs that are non procedural
(and that is why they are appealing).


 Some tasks have the characteristic of being definable with
dense, high level and abstract terms. That's why people
come up with higher level languages for them. I strongly
beleive that transforming an XML document falls in this
category of tasks.


 Take SQL for example, one could very well manipulate a relationnal
database with a procedural language, but people preffer SQL,
because of it's abstract and non procedural nature.


 It's interresting to note that anti XSL'ers advocate CSS1/CSS2.
Selectors in CSS2, are also rule based, (a kind of subset of XPath).
Imagine if you had to navigate the DOM with your favorite language
to set the display attributes of your nodes ...


 Maxime Levesque


> It appears to me that there is a long-running controversy when in comes to
> XSL (at least when it comes to the transformational aspect of
> XSL, any way).
> On the one hand, we have the pro-XSL'ers; and on the other, the
> anti-XSL'ers.  The anti-XSL'ers seem to think that the DOM is a better
> approach towards transforming XML, and the pro-XSL'ers obviously believe
> that XSL is the answer.  My question is:  will XSL be able to do
> everything
> that the DOM approach will enable you to do, and vice-versa?
>
> In other words, is there really a controversy, or are the anti-XSL'ers
> simply unwilling to learn something new?


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