RE: [xsl] Anybody know when "transform" became the term for the type ofthing XSL

Subject: RE: [xsl] Anybody know when "transform" became the term for the type ofthing XSL
From: "Aron Bock" <aronbock@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:52:25 +0000
Scripting implies (at least to me) telling an external entity (a web browser, an office application, an os shell) a sequence of actions it should perform, which is very different from the declarative style of XSLT.


I'd say "scripting" has less to do with the programming paradigm (imperative, functional, structured, etc) than with whether there's an explicit compile/link/run cycle, whether variables are typed, etc. Ousterhout, the Tcl guy, wrote much about it somewhere.


To mix in and respond to another post:

Because I think it devalues XSLT to call it a script.  Ok, it's
interpreted rather than compiled and it's relatively small but 'script'?
That's horrible.  Just my opinion.

Perhaps I'm reading things in here, but IMO there's nothing magical or special about XSL despite its declarative semantics: it's not particularly inaccessible or hard to learn, and it's not "art" (some algorithms are expressed better, and some not) -- it's a solution that caters to well to its current applications ... and that's about as much as can be said about most things in mainstream use. And somebody who writes or can write XSL is no more or less "artistic" than sombody who can write Ruby. Of course, at this point the Ruby folk say *that's* art, ad nauseum.


!

--A

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