Re: strengthening support for non-XSLT languages

Hi Robin,

Le mercredi 29 juin 2005 à 13:34 +0200, Robin Berjon a écrit :
> there is one part of the current GRDDL editor's draft that I believe is 
> problematic:
> 
> """
> While javascript, C, or any other programming language technically 
> expresses the relevant information, XSLT is specifically designed to 
> express XML to XML transformations and has some good safety characteristics.
> """
> --http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec#txforms
> 
> I understand the wish to use XSLT most of the time, and were I to deploy 
> GRDDL XSLT would likely be my choice.
> 
> However at WWW2005 I had an interesting conversation with the 
> microformats people, and how their efforts could be made to also fit 
> into the SemWeb if they used GRDDL. I started explaining how it worked 
> and the second I said "XSLT" someone shouted "Stop! You've already lost 
> most of the people you're trying to cater to." And the fact of the 
> matter is it's true.

I wish I could respond in longer terms to your very interesting message,
but I'd rather respond briefly now rather than leaving your message
sitting in my needsAReply box too long :)

So, my opinion on this is:
* the more languages that are required in GRDDL, the harder it becomes
to write GRDDL processor; in particular, as far as I know, XSLT
libraries that conform to the spec are much easier to find than
Javascript libraries - (which is also probably bound to the fact that
Javascript is not so well-defined as a technology)
* for the microformats developers, there is no need that every single
page author writes its own XSLT, a single person can do it for the whole
community; I believe there are enough people knowing how to use XSLT
that this should not be a problem, at least for microformats that are
popular enough
* however, given how GRDDL works, if someone is willing to implement a
processor using Javascript, it's perfectly possible to serve both an
XSLT and a javascript version of the transformation algorithm using
content negotiation (using the brand new MIME-type for javascript :)
* but indeed, there would be a need to explain how to produce RDF using
a document and javascript; if you have any particular suggestions, I
think we could link it from the specification next time it is published.

Dom
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/ERCIM
mailto:dom@w3.org