Re: Action item on syntax-based interoperability

At 3:54 PM -0400 10/23/03, Dan Connolly wrote:

>>  I like XSLT, but is it it a coincidence that XSLT in general is not
>>  exchanged on the Web today?
>
>No, it's not a coincidence; it's not even true.
>
>cf
>
>   W3C XSLT Service
>   http://www.w3.org/2001/05/xslt
>

I'm not sure what that proves. The page is HTML, and does not have an 
XSLT stylesheet. The service on that page is limited and clearly will 
not handle all XSLT stylesheets and input documents. And even if it 
did, it would still be running code on a local server to deliver to a 
remote client, rather than sending the client the document and 
stylesheet.

Anyway, I admit you can find a few XML+XSLT pages on the Web today. 
I've published a few myself. But I certainly don't expect them to be 
interoperable.


>and stuff like
>   http://udell.roninhouse.com/bytecols/2002-03-27.html
>

This article concludes:

That solved the problem, and enabled the prototyping exercise to go 
forward. I can't heartily recommend this approach, though. There are 
too many versions of MSXML floating around, and when you start trying 
to sort out the differences among them, you're on a slippery slope. 
Mozilla's XSLT engine, meanwhile, is a horse of a completely 
different color. So for the time being, XSLT is best exploited 
server-side. Still, it's impossible to ignore the power and appeal of 
client-side XSLT. There are already today whole applications built 
around this technology -- notably, the offline version of 
Salesforce.com's customer relationship management software. I 
continue to think that the fullest realization of the Web services 
architecture will be a peer-to-peer network whose nodes are 
consumers, transformers, and producers of XML. Distributing the 
transformative power throughout the network seems an obvious and 
inevitable next step.


That seems to buttress my point. It's all server side or offline, 
both systems that use XSLT locally only due to failures of disparate 
platforms to interoperate.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@metalab.unc.edu
   Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA

Received on Thursday, 23 October 2003 22:43:18 UTC