Re: XML + (XSL | CSS) ?

[Alain DESEINE <alain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel Glazman wrote:
> In my opinion in fact XSL does not only styles. As dsssl does it, it
> can handle styles, tree rewriting rules, etc... CSS does only styles
> for the moment. If we compare what can be compared, I mean CSS on one
> hand and XSL style-rules on the other hand, CSS has now the leading
> advantage. Not only because it is older and now implemented but also
> because it is human-readble in a single glance. I have been in a
> former life, six years ago, working on and with a so powerful but
> complex style language that writing simple sheets could take us weeks
> and sometimes months ! Even the developers' team I was a member of had
> hard moments understanding some side effects of our specificity and
> inheritance algorithms. I saw at that time developers & users,
> individuals or industrial companies, totally lost in the fourth
> dimension because our design tools were not
> what-you-think-you-get-is-what-you-get enough.
> 
> Being now on the other side of the vendor/customer relation, I just
> don't want to see this happen again, you see ?-) Simple and powerful
> is better for our millions of *ML documents than complex and powerful,
> that's all. Funny coincidence : it is often also better for
> implementors...
> 
> </Daniel>

You're totally rigth and i agree with you when you say that XSL does not
only style. That's what i say in my previous mail. I don't think that
CSS is simpler than XSL, or more "Human readable". They are just design
to do some different things. CSS can be use to give style to XML files,
where XSL can do the same (as XSL use CSS caracteristics) plus many
other things like Element re-ordering, Scripting, powerful selection
mechanism based on heritance/inheritance, and so on. So i think there is
no discussion about CSS versus XSL. If you just need to add some basic
style on a XML file, you can (and i agree that's the better way) use
CSS, but if you need to re-organize the document, refine the selection
of the target element, scripting, or something like that using XSL is a
better way. So i think that both must co-exist, and users have to do a
choice in relation with what they have to do, like with a programming
language. If you just have to develop a small application you probably
use a basic language, but if you need to programme an application that
work closer with the system, you probably use C language. Here is the
choice i guess.

For the tools that don't do what they supposed to do, I think that we
must wait some times before saying that about XSL, because many tools
are now in a conception phase, and we can only say that after testing
it. I guess you'll be surprise when you'll test the XSL tools when
they'll come up.

Alain.


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