Robb Shecter wrote:
> For example, the way that these HTML template systems have been described
> makes it sound like they're competitors to the idea of XML+XSL.
I would offer that XML+XSL is one examlpe of a template system. The
transformation from XML to HTML through XSL is the template part. The
creation of XML is the responsibility of the "business logic".
> I wonder how these two approaches compare? An advantage of HTML might be that
> "anyone" can do HTML layout, but writing XSL is much more like programming.
This is true. XSL is very programmatic. Perhaps it might be possible to
write a tool that takes an HTML page and an XML DTD and can generate an
XSL description. The user of the tool would graphically "mark up" the
HTML page to reference things like user.name and account.balance.
> On the other hand, a servlet producing XML (which gets transformed by XSL),
> seems like it has a more clearly defined function; it would construct an XML
> doc of a known type. It also seems like passing XML around would "scale"
> better in a design sense. You've got a formal description of a particular
> important abstraction in your system.
Yea, verily! The servlet producing the XML is really part of the
application tier, not part of the presentation tier. The mechanism
transforming the XML into HTML is part of the presentation tier. This
allows a the presentation tier to be reused across mutiple business
applications.
> But in "typical" web/scripting/app-writing scenarios, this kind of design
> formality might be a drawback.
If (when) we have real WYSIWYG tools for graphic designers to use to
develop XSL from DTDs, this won't be an issue. Before we had decent HTML
tools, the programmers were developing the HTML. Ah, those were simpler
days...
- Paul Philion
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