At 08:23 PM 10/8/01, Tim wrote:
Also XSL as a spec of w3c has XSLT and xsl-fo as sub classes. (Like
different classes of cheese - although a strange choice of subject!) Just as
'Birds' discribes a group, and pigeons and sea gulls are types of birds -
XSL has XSLT and xsl-fo
While this analogy does possibly capture the "subclass/superclass"
relationship of the specifications, it is still somewhat forced. XSL is to
XSLT as cheese is to Cheddar fails because XSLT is not really a "type" of
XSL. Nor does the recipe for cheese (the Cheese Specification) include the
recipe for Cheddar (Cheddar 1.0).
Rather, I'd say XSL is to XSLT as cheese is to milk. One generally needs
milk to make cheese. A definition of what constitutes milk (source,
butterfat content etc.) has to be included in the Cheese Specification. A
cheese-eating society might well see milk as mainly significant or
interesting as a primary ingredient in cheese.
Yet milk is, while an ingredient in cheese, also much more general-purpose.
In fact, most users of milk don't make cheese out of it. (Just so, many
people write XSLT transforms without writing "XSL stylesheets" in the
fullest sense implied by the XSL specification, since they're not
targetting XSL formatting objects.)
Since, however, the only normative definition of what constitutes milk, is
in the Cheese Specification (albeit published separately as Milk 1.0 in the
knowledge that milk is also good for other things), naturally much of the
discussion on the Cheese-makers listserv, is about milk. It becomes, de
facto, a discussion not only about cheese, but also about cheese-related
products and other things made of milk, other things Cheese-makers (and
others) do with milk, the properties of milk (boiling, curdling, controlled
spoilage), various kinds of milk and milk additives, etc. In fact, if
anyone wants to know about milk, they ultimately have to come to the
Cheese-makers, since "milk" is defined only as a part of "cheese".
What we don't talk about is that "Cheese Food Product" stuff that is
actually made out of soy protein, and is only (falsely) called "cheese" by
its marketers.
Confused enough yet?
Cheese,
Wendell
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