Re: XSL Requirements (was: Microsoft extensions to XSL)

[Daniel Glazman <Daniel.Glazman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

> My bet is that the formatting part of XSL would just wither away. CSS seems,
> at the moment, to have much more momentum as being "the" style sheet
> language. On the other hand, XSL seems to have a fair momentum as being
> "the" transformation language to use... Of course, my crystal ball doesn't
> have a warranty :-)

	I don't think that momentum is a good argument for industry ;-)
Let's face the reality : the W3C has one standard based on an existing
formatting model : CSS ; it is now building a new standard based on another
formatting model : XSL. I hardly see industry, which already started to
work with CSS, rewrite style sheets to turn databases into XSL ! I wrote
"rewrite" and not "translate" because I think that the 2 models are so
different an automatic and direct translation will be difficult.
	Transformations ?... We have only one answer, which is our last
submission to the consortium [1]. This document is not as precise and
incredibly descriptive as the XSL draft is, but it is a good basis for
a declarative transformation language based on CSS general syntax.

> As Didier PH Martin (mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) correctly pointed out, a
> pattern matching language is never sufficient by itself to do general
> structural transformations. He's also correct in that it would have been
> interesting to start with a procedural language (say, JavaScript) and add
> pattern matching facilities to it, instead of starting with a pattern
> matching language and adding procedural hooks to it.

	Excellent comment. This is a great suggestion for MS behaviors
+ DOM + [1]. This message is Cc:ed to Chris Wilson for this reason.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Submission/1998/19/

</Daniel>


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