RE: XSL is difficult to...?

[Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@xxxxxxx>]

> I am not necessarily proposing that 'switch' and 'case' be 
> used.  I want us to discuss the choice of names publically so that better 
> names can be found if possible.  XSL can only get better if we ask
ourselves 
> questions like why we have both 'otherwise' and 'else' instead of just
'else'?

Don, I agree with some of your points and not with others. These things are
highly subjective, and we are all conditioned by what we have grown familiar
with.

My own view is that the XSL vocabulary is sufficiently small that it should
be possible for most of the commands to be single English words. I do find
it inelegant to have such a mix of different styles in one language:

- ultra-verbose keywords (from-ancestor-or-self)
- long keywords (apply-templates, preserve-space, function-available)
- consise keywords (choose, if, match, select, position)
- abbreviated words (param, concat, id, docref, qname, pi)
- ultra-terse punctuation (//.[@*='?']/..)

But we learn to live with clumsy syntax; I wouldn't have voted for many of
the keywords in XML or Java either. It's clear from the questions on this
list that most "newbies" are having problems with the semantics of the
language, not with its syntax.

Mike Kay 


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