Re: [xsl] questions about XSLT philosophy: how much is too much?

Subject: Re: [xsl] questions about XSLT philosophy: how much is too much?
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 12:28:07 GMT
 so what's next?  adding even more math functions?  max()?
 min()? 

max and min are in the suggested core set of functions  for xpath2, as
well as a host of stuff related to dates etc.


  (and the introduction in XSLT 1.1 of <xsl:script> suggests
  that a stylesheet may eventually become little more than a
  wrapper for a procedural solution.)
  

XSLT 1.1 is _explictly_ a dead end it will not proceed to REC and should
not be taken as an indication of the future. The XSLT2 drafts are in an
advanced state and are an indication of where the working group hopes to
take XSLT.  However even in XSLT 1.1 xsl:script did not imply procedural
solutions, any more than the fact that XSLT 1 engines tend to be
implemeted in procedural languages such as C or java. xsl:script was
simply a mechanism for allowing user level function definition in
external languges. One could (and should) have written pure side effect
free functions wherever possible. But the whole xsl:script idea was
withdrawn anyway.

   it seems
  that a lot of what XSLT is being used for is starting to
  push the bounds of what i initially considered stylesheet
 "transformation",

XSLT was part of the original view of XML as "SGML on the web"
XML was to be SGML-light and paired with a DSSSL-light (XSLT) that would
render XML documents using a client side transformation to the browser's
native formatting capability which would be expressed in XML syntax as XSL
Formatting objects.

Since a large part of current XML usage does not fit that original XML
vision at all it's hardly surprising that XSLT is being used in ways not
previously envisioned. We generate a lot of C code with XSLT for
example...

David

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