in reply to What's Your Mental Image of XSLT?

Thanks again, everyone for taking part. I'm getting a faint, distant hint of an inkling that not everyone likes XSLT or even XML...

The reason I'm having to get to grips with it is that there are voices lobbying for XSLT to be used as the transformation language for the new Content Management System where I work.

It would of course be better than making up Yet Another Templating Language ourselves, but in most other ways I'm distinctly unhappy about it... 


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Re: Re: What's Your Mental Image of XSLT?
by dws (Chancellor) on Oct 12, 2003 at 00:10 UTC
    I'm getting a faint, distant hint of an inkling that not everyone likes XSLT or even XML...

    XML is a fairly decent platform neutral way to express hierarchical data. XSLT is a decent way to express--again in a platform neutral way--transformations on hierarchical data. Performance is an open issue.

    Martin Fowler has another take on XSLT. See http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/MovingAwayFromXslt.html.

[reply]
      The really great thing about XSLT is that at least it's not DSSSL. DSSSL is basically Scheme with embedded CSS-like constructs. It, unlike the bagpipes, smells as bad as it sounds.

      The really, really great thing about XML+XSLT is that you can just blat them at the client's browser and, for sufficiently correct values of "browser", you get rendered content. Transformation too slow? Get a proper computer, pal, it ain't our servers.

      All markup and associate transformation languages suck; they, by definition, have to. After all, in order to fit your abitrary data into a structure that anyone else can understand, you've got to pack in a wheen of redundancy, convention and plain old hope to make sure the message gets through.

      --
      bowling trophy thieves, die!

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