Re: Default XSL stylesheet for XHTML documents

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:


 > So development of XSL is waste of time?

Yes, absolutely. It is also a waste of neurons. In the W3C and
between the WGs, it is a waste of money and energy. My personal opinion
only, of course.

IMO, XML+XSLT+CSS will be the market leader for all-days-
life solutions. Industry/Defense will probably need XML+XSLT+XSL
but the requirements can be very different : no need for dynamic
browsers.

 > XML documents can be transformed to
 > XHTML documents and styled with CSS equally so noone needs XSL?

Like many others, I express a strong interest in XSLT and believe
that XSL FOs is a dead duck...

 > Why didn't
 > anyone notice that and stopped XSL development?

Once again, let's make the difference between transformations and
styles. XSLT is a running thing. XSL FOs will hardly appear in
any good-quality browser.


 > | What's more, XSL has not even reached version 1.0 yet. CSS is
currently in
 > | the development of it's third revision.
 >
 > You do not want to tell me, the higher the version number is, the
better the
 > technologie.

In a world of standards, yes. CSS reaches level 3 because implementors
contributed to levels 1, 2 and 3. Because CSS level 1 is now fully
implemented, because CSS 2 support is getting better and better. Because
browsers and web-tools vendors are all involved in the standardization
process of CSS. I still have no XSL FOs rendering engine on my
laptop, sorry.

There is another interesting argument : I started working in the
SGML/DSSSL world more than ten years ago. The people now pushing XSL
styles are the people who were calling for a clear and strict separation
between content and style. Now, with the XML-everywhere fever, we are
just doing the contrary, gathering content and style in a single,
integrated instance.

You can say that CSS obliges to have another parser. Yes. So what ? It
is a so simple parser that a student can write it as the first item
in his final project. Using XSL FOs and reusing the XML parser does
not really help : the implementation of XSL FOs is still very complex.

Last but not least : CSS is simple, like HTML was simple in the early
days. Anyone can write a simple stylesheet using notepad. What about
XSL formatting objects, or even XSLT ?

</Daniel>




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Received on Monday, 2 October 2000 03:57:32 UTC