Subject: RE: Leventhal's challenge misses the point From: Miles Sabin <msabin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 28 May 1999 14:14:51 +0100 |
Linda van den Brink wrote, > Maybe the solution there is to have teams of > specialists who do visual design and specialists who > take care of publication of (textual/other) source > adhering to this design. I've seen people who draw > their entire visual design of a web page in for > example paint shop pro, and then show this to a web > programmer who actually creates it for them. There's a couple of ways I can interpret this statement: 1. It doesn't matter if non-programmers can't use XSL: they were never the intended constituency anyway. or, 2. It does matter if non-programmers can't use XSL. Maybe they won't be able to (which is a shame), but there are workarounds. Either way, I think it's a bit of a problem. In fact, I think we're getting quite close to what I think is the chief defect of XSL. Despite what's said about it, it doesn't really separate data-model from presentation all that well ... that's why we'll probably end up with your scenario of designers using drawing packages and having to hand them over to programmers to implement. XML/XSL is a model-view type architecture. MV is good at breaking the dependency of data-models on presentation issues. Unfortunately it's very poor at separating presentation issues from the data model. That territory is handled quite nicely by the model-view-controller architecture: a data-model, a presentation model, and something which coordinates between the two. Translating that into the XML space we'd have something like: an XML data model (as now), an XML presentation model (maybe a skeletal FO document), and something that binds the two together (effectively an imperative script). Application programmers would focus on the data-model; designers would focus on the presentation model (supported by visual tools); and the glue would be done by a completely separate group ... perhaps they'd have to be programmer-designers, perhaps just programmers. Anyhow the upshot would be a clean separation of concerns and skill-sets. Cheers, Miles -- Miles Sabin Cromwell Media Internet Systems Architect 5/6 Glenthorne Mews +44 (0)181 410 2230 London, W6 0LJ msabin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx England XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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