Re: A would-be user's first XSL experience (long)

[Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Todd Fahrner wrote:
> 
> Personally, I'd be grudgingly content with a precompiled
> console-style app for Mac - a very prominent platform in the
> professional Web design and development industry, to say nothing of
> print. There are many others with some understanding of markup,
> however, for whom any console app will be a little steep.

If you download xt from jclark.com you'll see that it has a file "xt.jar".
This is a *compiled* Java library. I don't know how Java works on the Mac
but I know that it does. So you don't have to compile anything. You just
need to put "xt.jar" and "xp.jar" (from the xp distribution) somewhere
where your Java implementation can find them (CLASSPATH???) and invoke
xt.jar:

java xt.jar source stylesheet result

If you figure it out then you can tell other Mac users how it works.

> [I know the overall statistics, but it still
> appears to me that among those superficial, media-centric Web
> developers who work above the application layer, easily half prefer
> Macs. Easily 2/3 in San Francisco's and New York's silicon
> gulch/alley.]

My experience is that these are the last people in an organization to buy
the separation of abstraction from presentation. I would be amazed if we
could really count on them as allies in this discussion. Most of them
think XML (much less XSL!) is a Unix-inspired plot to make their lives
more complicated. They are mostly right: XML does tend to make their lives
more complicated but that's sometimes the price of progress.

I suspect that roughly 1 in 1000 would even find our Web front-end on
xml.com (what would they be doing on xml.com???).

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

"Silence," wrote Melville, "is the only Voice of God." The assertion,
like its subject, cuts both ways, negating and affirming, implying both
absence and presence, offering us a choice; it's a line that the Society
of American Atheists could put on its letterhead and the Society of
Friends could silently endorse while waiting to be moved by the spirit
to speak. - Listening for Silence by Mark Slouka, Apr. 1999, Harper's


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