Re: XSL: Why?

Simon St.Laurent (simonstl@simonstl.com)
Wed, 30 Sep 1998 12:35:13 -0400

At 12:25 PM 9/30/98 -0400, Tyler Baker wrote:
>XSL
>at the moment does not play any currently implemented role, but I forsee
that it
>will be something we actively support as separating abstract content from
>presentation content I believe will become a mainstay of application
frameworks
>for the web. The best thing we have right now that I have seen is Cold
Fusion.
>This primarily is only a server-side solution and costs a lot of money.
XSL's
>strength I feel will be on the client side as all that a web server will
need to
>do is present easy to construct XML content at the server level, and then
fetch a
>stylesheet for the particular user (which could be customized via some
sort of
>profile). The content viewer which may be an HTML browser then can do all of
>this processing on the client machine rather than bog down the server with
>complicated content presentation processing.

Once again, CSS can separate abstract content from presentation quite
neatly. In what circumstances is this separation so drastic as to require
a transformation? I'm sure they must be out there. Database tables ->
neatly formatted pages? Documents that can change their structure at a
user's whim?

I'm having a hard time coming up with practical uses for XSL that don't
remind me of nuclear missiles homing in on a gnat, hell bent on blasting
that little gnat to smithereens.

Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth (November)
Building XML Applications (December)
http://www.simonstl.com