Re: Leventhal's challenge misses the point

[Nicolas Pottier <nic@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'll just throw in my 2 cents..

I'm new to XSL, but have used it enough to get the basic gist of
things.  I'm a programmer at heart but have done alot of HTML work in
the past including authoring and maintaining some large sites.  My
interest in XSL and CSS are purely in transforming XML into interactive
HTML, so my opinions are biased towards that.  Here are my comments on
XSL vs CSS/DOM so far.

1) For simple transformations I like XSL, although it takes a bit to
figure out what's going on at first, it allows for complete
transformations of XML into pretty much any HTML with relative ease.

2) For anything BUT simple transformations, at least anything that
requires interactions, I find XSL to get very ugly, very quickly.  I
also find XSL to be less clear than the equivilent CSS/DOM, though this
might have to do with my experience with it.

The problem is that for interactive documents you need to start to use
JavaScript and the DOM, and using this within XSL just makes debugging
the awful JavaScript language that much harder.  If you're going to need
to learn JS and the DOM anyways, why not just use CSS?

Anyways, we're switching our project over to CSS/DOM after banging our
head against XSL for a couple weeks and finding it to be kludgy for
interactive documents.  I will likely use XSL again in the future for
simple transformations, as for these it is cleaner than CSS/DOM, but for
anything more complicated I expect CSS/DOM to be more efficient.

-Nic


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