Having been a cocoon user for a long time XSLT is something that the
majority of developers will never "get". It's a big mind shift from an
imperative to a functional language. So I would caution against exposing
XSLT to the masses. On the other hand if the xml to X/HTML where hidden
then I think most designers would be okay with it. Hell they can even
preview with a <?stylesheet ?> a the top of the file.
I haven't done it with Velocity yet, but I've maintained HTML web sites this way for some time. Once the stylesheet is setup, the developers really only interact with the XML. The transformation can be rolled into the Ant build and becomes transparent to the developer.
I agree that most developers couldn't create a stylesheet from scratch (at least without a lot of head scratching), but most can manage to edit one to make minor changes. At least, that's my personal experience =:0)
What I've been doing is pre-processing as part of my build. I run a series of XSLT transformations on the source files to produce the .vm files. No XSLT weight at runtime :).
Yes, I believe that's what Jeff and I want to try ourselves.
It might be fun to setup a small library of some basic website styles that other could crib. Like the starter templates that ship with things like FrontPage and DreamWeaver. Header, Footer, Menu at the left. Menu at the top and bottom, and so forth
-Ted.
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