Re: Generating high-level formatting output

[Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> / Norman Gray <norman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> was heard to say:
> |    to maintain.  Certainly DSSSL's brackets take a little getting used
> |    to, but you _can_ get used to them; the visual clutter of XSLT code
> |    wouldn't go away.
> 
> I agree. The world won't accept Scheme though. Marketing
> non-starter.
> 
   I think this is about as important an issue as you say the "XSL
won't do SGML" one is.  You just put an SGML parser in front of your
XSL processor and you're in business...  Let me make an analogy.
   If everyone had to write their applications in the machine code
that processors execute, *computers* would have been a marketing
non-starter.  But, the model of this machine code was well designed
and efficient.  So, assembler language was created to provide a
friendlier interface.  Still, it was difficult.  So, languages like C
were written.  They were more powerful, in that you could do more with
less code, and were more friendly to work with, but you sacrificed a
bit of flexibility and such.  More, higher-level tools evolved on top
of these.  Generally, they were more specialized to do specific tasks,
and each one had its own restrictions.
   The grove model is machine code.  DSSSL is assembler.  The
transformation language is C.  The style language (which, I believe,
can be built upon the transformation language) is like C with a really
good library.  XSL (or some version thereof) could be a language which
is parsed at a somewhat higher level into the DSSSL transformation (or
style) language.  It hides some things about how DSSSL works, and may
present the processing model a little differently, but it uses the
grove, one way or another.  And so on...
   I know Dr. Steve may scowl at me a bit for mentioning this here (or
not...), but I've just recently seen his GroveMinder demo.  Folks, if
you think you can do without the grove model, you have no idea what
you're missing...

-Brandon :)


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