Re: Microsoft XSL and Conformance

[Dan Morrison <dman at es dot co dot nz>]

Juergen Hermann wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 17 Mar 2000 02:01:12 +1300, Dan Morrison wrote:
> 
> >I really appreciate nesting xsl:template items, 

> But it complicates things (the DTD, the processors, ...)

Not from the clients POV!
Give the customer the choice of learning two new languages, neither of
which are actually supported on their system, or to just keep on using
the tool they're familiar with, guess what they choose?
I gave a real-world example as I've seen XML discussions get way
theoretical too many times.

Coming from a coders perspective, you may not like that it takes a few
more lines in your parser, but there are theoretically a bunch of people
out there who want to USE the language, not make the development easier. 

> using modes or more specific XPath matches in STANDARD xslt.

I'm well aware it can be done in XML in any number of ways, and frankly
given some platform support I would have.

The payoff for me was being able to visually edit my templates, in this
case a big win. I just don't like the way that all the templates end up
at the same level in the stylesheet, when logically some of them only
exist as children of others.

The automatic scoping feature also means you don't have to hard-code too
many extended/complicated match paths into your code. - easier, simpler,
more maintainable code.

> >I learned in the usual manner (view source & copy)
> Is that the usual manner? I learned by reading tutorials

It sure seems to be the norm in the web... :-)

Well OK, thats how I _started_. It's not like I picked up a book and
thought 'Gee, never heard of this before, I'de better learn it!'

It was seeing what some people were doing with it, downloading samples,
and modifying the demos (view source & copy)

Then seeing how other people got results I appreciated, and seeing how
they did it. I was result-driven - "How do I do this?" rather than
theory-driven - "What can this do?"

Thus I'm happy to admit I was taking XML pages apart well before I read
the spec.

Anyway, given that it seems that context-sensitive templates are
regarded as bad things by the spec, I'll stop selling up what I thought
was a feature, but turns out to be a bug after all...

cheers, .dan.


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