Re: [xsl] Announcement: Dexter - XSL Transform Generation Tool

[Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Dykman wrote:
> Abel: would you mind if I borrowed some of your verbiage for that documentation?
>   

No, not at all, I'd be honored! ;)


> > Another note, but now about the design of your product. Though it looks
> > like a well thought-of design, I think you made one major mistake not to
> > go the W3C XML way to write extensions in their own namespace. 
> >     
>
> Noted.  That is something I am aiming for in version 2.  I was anxious to get the
> idea out of head and that is one of the decisions I made early on just to get a
> working model.  The namespace would be a welcome addition.
>   

More than welcome, even (and I sure hope you meant version 0.2, because 
2.0 seems to be a bit too far off ;)

One other thought: you mention SVG as an example on your website, but 
both SVG and XSL-FO, which are superb candidates for use-cases of your 
tool, cannot be tested anymore once you start creating a design 
document: an invalid SVG or XSL-FO document (and it is invalid once your 
attributes are used) will not render. This is different from the XHTML 
examples, which will still render. Not using a namespace unfortunately 
renders your tool useless for all but the most trivial examples.... 
(meaning: your tool will still work, but the strength of it, as you 
state on your homepage, that you can *design* a document without it 
being tampered by your extensions, does not hold any longer).

> <alessandro.bologna@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>   
> > I do have a question, if you don't mind. Why did you choose to
> > generate the XSLT from the template in Java, instead of XSLT? A
> >     
>
> You know, it never occurred to me until I read this.  That is an
> excellent idea and bears
> some thought.  I chose Java because I am intimate with it's XML
> facilities and there is a
> lot of logical transformation going on under the covers which is more readily
> accomplished with a general purpose language. 
>   

Opinions vary. But yes, sometimes business logic is better written in a 
GP language. But there's another benefit when doing this solely in XSLT: 
people do not have to invest in your tools, they can just embed the XSLT 
in their current systems without much changes to their architecture. And 
possibly/hopefully, your settings file, which is now embedded in the JAR 
and is a java .properties file, will then become an XML settings file.