RE: [xsl] xslt and fuzzy logic

Subject: RE: [xsl] xslt and fuzzy logic
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 13:57:09 -0500
At 11:44 AM 1/24/02, Bryan wrote:
thanks, I like it, but I was thinking more along the lines of what way would
one do fuzzy logic in xslt 2.0, and could one handle the computation without
big drain on resources.

Well, XSLT 1.0 was not designed with heavy computation as a primary use case. Rather, the expectation of its designers would be that you would already have done your computation by the time your stuff was in XML, and XSLT would be for getting it into a nice pretty human-readable form.


It's like using a Model T Ford to haul furniture around. They were only trying to make a little buggy for you and your girlfriend. You're saying "Hey I could haul furniture around" but they haven't designed the pickup truck yet.

 However it was helpful in that I'm currently having
to do a lot of generation of xslt from xml, and it had some things that gave
food for thought, this is a problem, it seems when people generate xslt from
xml it's very difficult to get a proper balance of xml, either the xml is
too simple and one can't derive much benefit from it, or the xml is too
complex and approaches the nature of a scripting language. (and who wants to
learn a new language?) :)

Nor was XML designed to provide a syntax for "languages" in the sense of C, Java or Perl -- or XSLT -- but rather for *markup* languages, which is quite a different kind of critter. If you have an application that can really make use of semi-structured data and can use XML for storing and managing it, this balance may be easier to find. There's a big difference (even given an interesting overlap) between designing the structure of a data set, and designing a grammar to be interpreted or compiled for execution.


The overlap is in using XML to design a processing specification or even, like XSLT, a declarative language. I don't have experience in this area (I'd like to hear from readers who do) -- but XSLT itself "approaches the nature of a scripting language" doesn't it? (And there are those who feel its XML syntax is, on balance, a liability not an asset. I say "well it depends" -- again, on the problem you're trying to solve and how close that is to the class of problems XSLT was designed for.)

But check out an interesting article at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-sbxml.html?dwzone=xml.

Anyway, food for thought, for sure. It's cool to hear about people trying stuff like this!

Cheers,
Wendell


====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================


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