He's a shining example for us all to look up to ;-)
> XSL:
>
> Does the XSL transformation language help?
>
> I believe that given our current level of knowledge, the XSL
> transformation language goes too far the *other* way. Nobody currently
> knows how to verify that a document that conforms to a DTD A will conform
> to a DTD B after going through an XSL transformation without doing the
> transformation. This means that authors who use XSL transformations to get
> to industry standard DTDs must constantly do the transformation to check
> that they still conform. This is unacceptable for solving the problem I
> described. In this context, XSL is a gun aimed at the foot.
>
> If someone wants to sponsor 3 months of research, I will be happy to
> develop algorithms that can predict whether an input document will conform
> to an output DTD after an XSL transformation, without doing the
> transformation (as long as XSL doesn't get more complex in the meantime!).
Paul, you know very well that this is generally an unsolveable
problem. I haven't had a chance to read the latest XSL spec, but
unless the programatic aspects have been considerably reduced, I think
you'll be disappointed at the end of the 3 months - no matter how
brilliant (and Paul is brilliant) you are. Of course, if they have
made those changes, then you might have success in 3 months, but then
XSL will fail for the general formatting problem.
Matthew