Subject: Re: About the source library From: Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 14:11:21 -0400 |
/ "Didier PH Martin" <martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> was heard to say: | a) XSL lacks a procedural language. Actually the "function" support is | insufficient for a lot of tasks. Just take an example from this morning. | Someone posted a DSSSL script that removes trailing spaces. XSL won't be | able to do that until complete integration of a procedural language or an | expression language (the actual JavaScript inclusion is too limited) My recent experiences writing XSL stylesheets for DocBook (http://nwalsh.com/docbook/xsl) leave me less concerned about this than I used to be. XSL's more expressive selection syntax reduces the need for procedural programming. And recursive calls to named templates can do quite a lot ;-) | b) You'll never be able to transform SGML documents. XSL is for XML only. Nonsense. XSLT is a tree-to-tree transformation language. There's no reason an XSL processor couldn't load SGML documents and process them. | Off course if we make the inference that SGML will disappear and that XML | will cover the planet. This feature is obsolete and unnecessary. And we'll | also have to make the inference that Hytime will disappear and that topic | maps will be a death born child. What features of HyTime are not possible in XML? Remember, XML is SGML. | elements. The question is: how long will it take for XSL to have a full | expression language or that a procedural language like JavaScript can have | full access to the document's elements? Or will it ever do? You've got pretty full access now. Cheers, norm -- Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx> | I plead contemporary insanity. http://nwalsh.com/ | DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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