Re: Venting

[Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> The point bellow is the key I feel to the issues being presented. We are
> getting dangerously close to persuing marketing 

Labelling things accurately is not "marketing." XSL is being used widely
for transformations. The specification provides a back-door for allowing
it to be used that way. Thousands of people around the world use it that
way. All we are asking is to call a spade a spade.

> rather than issues of a
> style language, chief proponents of the split being a self confessed
> entreprneur, and a company with a completed transformation parser.

Funny how you forgot the educators, consultants and authors who have said
the same thing.

> As I understand it, DSSSL expresses both transformation and flow objects
> (equiv. formatting objects). Would DSSSL users appreciate the split of
> these?

DSSSL is already split into a transformation and a style language. It was
like that from day one. They both have official names and it is completely
legal to implement one without the other. (not the case with XSL)

The nature of the style and transformation languages are radically
different from the split we are proposing, however. The DSSSL "style
language" is sufficiently powerful to be much like the XSL "transformation
language." When and if DSSSL is revised I strongly suspect that the "style
language" will be split again. We understand these issues much better
today than we did years ago. I expect that it was James Clark's
*experience with* the DSSSL style language applied as a transformation
language that allowed James Clark to build the XSL transformation language
so cleanly. Now we just need to get the terminology straight.

> It is also the stated goal of the XSL WG to achieve for XML a style
> language at least as expressive as DSSSL and CSS... why should we have less
> than that for XSL?

Nobody has proposed that XSL should be less powerful than it is projected
to be. This is a red herring.

 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

"Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did,
but she did it backwards and in high heels."
                                               --Faith Whittlesey


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