Re: [xsl] Two recommendations: (1) Call it XSLT "program" (not XSLT "stylesheet"), (2) stop treating XSLT as an acronym

Subject: Re: [xsl] Two recommendations: (1) Call it XSLT "program" (not XSLT "stylesheet"), (2) stop treating XSLT as an acronym
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 21:15:22 +0100
On 22/05/2010 13:12, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> Note: In the following I am just talking about XSLT. I am not talking about XSL-FO.
>
> XSLT is a programming language. It is used to create programs. Personally, I never use XSLT to perform styling.


As Ken said, this is unlikely to be true.

> When was the last time you used XSLT to set a font color or
> background color?

Most days.

> I use CSS to do styling.

If I use CSS then often as not xslt is inserting the classes that affect the styles, if I'm generating xsl-fo or TeX or input to 3b2 then the styling aspect is even more visible.


> Thus, I come to my first recommendation. > > RECOMMENDATION #1 > > When you write or talk about an XSLT document, call it a program. > Don't call it a stylesheet.

This is trying to take everyone back 12 years to the discussion of whether to use xsl:stylesheet or xsl:transform. Most people quickly realised it was a pointless discussion and simply use xsl:stylesheet always.

> For example, say this: "I wrote an XSLT program to screen-scrape
> Yahoo Finance." Don't say this: "I wrote an XSLT stylesheet to
> screen-scrape Yahoo Finance."
>
>
> It is regrettable that XSLT is an acronym standing for
> XML _Stylesheet_ Language Transformations.

History is informative, not regrettable.

> As described above, rarely (if ever) is XSLT used for styling. Thus,
> the acronym is completely misleading. This leads to my second > recommendation.
>
> RECOMMENDATION #2
>
> Stop treating XSLT as an acronym. It is just the name of a programming language, just as Java is the name of a programming language.
>
> Comments?



> > /Roger > >

David

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