RE: First working draft of XSL

[David Schach <davidsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The original XSL submission used XML for the patterns.  However, the new XSL
pattern syntax is much more concise and easier to read than an XML based
pattern syntax.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Mark_Overton@xxxxxxxxx [SMTP:Mark_Overton@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent:	Tuesday, August 18, 1998 10:30 AM
> To:	xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:	Re: First working draft of XSL
> 
> My first thought is this:
> Why did they not use XML for the structure of the patterns, etc.
> 
> For example,
> Here is a rule example from the new spec
> <xsl:template match="book[excerpt]/author[attribute(degree)]">
> ...
> </xsl:template>
> 
> This could have been something like:
> <xsl:template>
>      <match>
>           <element type="book">
>                <element type="excerpt"/>
>                <target type="author>
>                     <attribute name="degree"/>
>                </target>
>           </type>
>      </match>
> <action>
>   ...
> </action>
> </xsl:template>
> 
> This way the xsl processor could read the stylesheet without having to
> parse all of this new syntax.  We have a great tool in XML for
> representing
> structured data so why did we have to come up with another?  Now, to read
> an XSL stylesheet I need to parse all of these new delimiters and more
> ('/'
> | '//' | '(' | ')' | '|' | '[' | ']' | ',' | '=' | '.' | '..' | '*' | '{'
> |
> '(' |, etc.......).  All of the built in functionality of my XML parser is
> of no use.  What a shame.
> 
> -Mark Overton
> 
> 
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list