Re: [xsl] XML/XSLT for web templating

[Alessandro Bologna <alessandro.bologna@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you all for your responses, they are very much appreciated.

I agree with Michael that quite often in this circumstances the  
technical merit is not nearly as important as the ability to persuade  
people that the technology in question is not a threat to their  
careers, but instead a chance to work better. At the same time,  
especially in IT, especially in really large publishing companies,  
you could expect a bit more openness towards new ways of doing  
things... Things have changes quite a lot in that field, since  
Gutenberg...

And, Kamal, I don't know either who puts that misinformation out, but  
it is a fact that there's a lot of otherwise very smart people  
working in the software industry who are simply considering XSLT too  
much of a foreign object to be understood, and keep the tales going.
At the same is true that, in my experience, once I sit with them and  
show them how XML is not that complicated to deal with, if you can  
use XSLT, they often change their heart. As Alex put it, to not use  
is really masochism.

Has anybody noticed how still today (10 years after its introduction)  
people think of XML as CSV, but just more complicated and using angle  
brackets instead of commas? Aren't all the other "templating"  
solutions treating XHTML as plain text?
How many times on this list have we seen somebody asking "why <a  
href="<xsl:value-of select="link"/>"> doesn't work"? Or how about the  
question "how do I open a tag inside an <xsl:if>?".

The number of products that convert XML into Java beans is another  
example of how little it is assimilated in the programmer's mind that  
XML can be a data structure that can be used directly. It seems that  
the driver to stay away from it is so strong that it doesn't matter  
if the XML is highly unstructured, it doesn't matter that for every  
frequent change in the schema the entire application needs to be  
recompiled and deployed, anything it's still better than dealing with  
it.

I realize that I may be preaching to the chorus, but it's hard not to  
be frustrated.

In any case, the reason why I originally wrote was to see if there  
was anybody who had experience with large scale deployments in the  
world of web publishing, that are using XML and XSLT and that could  
volunteer to share that experience. Of course I realize that there  
may be more than one constrain and NDAs to prevent doing so, but  
still, asking should be ok...

And yes, of course, I am aware of Coocon as a platform, Lenya, the  
Docbook standard etc, but one of the most common objections that I  
face is "there's no large site that uses it". Somebody recently even  
reported "eBay was using it, but now they are moving to JSP because  
it doesn't work". Since there's no sticker that says "made with XSLT"  
or "powered by Saxon" (maybe we should start doing it) and  
transformed pages are still .html, it's hard to provide evidence of  
the contrary.

And, last, and half jokingly, why don't we start a "fear-not- 
xslt.com" collective blog? It could be not such a bad resource for  
w3c evangelists...
Thanks for your time again to all. It is true that this mailing list  
is one of the most generous and active ones. I think I haven't seen  
yet one single question going unanswered, no matter how naive or  
complicated.

Regards,
Alessandro