Stephen Winnall wrote:
I think a lot of the anti-XSLT sentiment comes from people who don't see the point of XML.
Yes, there are many of these.
XML and its philosophy are far too complicated for the average designer-cum-website-hacker. This is neither a criticism of XML nor of the d-c-w-h. XML and tools which make use of it and fairly advanced IT, and enable complicated integration projects (such as one might conduct with Cocoon). If you don't have a training in IT and don't share a broader vision like the semantic web, you may crave "simpler" tools for simple websites. And if you think you don't need XML, you certainly won't think you need XSLT or any other XML-based technology.
This is the approach which enables us to publish e-journals with the author's/editors' only concern being to create an ODT or OOXML document with the relevant stylesheet. The ability of Cocoon (and related technologies) to "hide the bumpy bits" us a huge advantage.
I agree with the point in previous posts about Cocoon's learning curve being too daunting. I wonder if it would be easier if we had more XML-based tools which hid XML itself from the user. For example, graphical tools for the sitemap or for generating XSLT which hide the grisly XML bits from the user. Speaking personally, I don't feel that XML is a thing of beauty on the surface: but it certainly has deeper virtues!
IMHE the attempts to create a purely visual d'n'd XSLT-generating interface are only useful at the upper levels (eg positioning a heading, formatting a list). I'm not sure it would provide any advantage when it comes to the lower levels where you need to combine logic and layout, such as conditionally enabling a portlet fragment inside a banner component which itself is subject to several layers of conditionality. But someone may yet crack that one.
I've been using Cocoon almost since the start, and although there are bits I haven't grokked yet, I find it one of the most productive tools around. There are aspects of its design I disagree with (the removal of DTD-detected pipelines from v1.*, the lack of interface to the system like directory listing or date/time awareness, and the inability to execute an external program even when the program generates XML, unless you fake it via a web script), but it's flexible enough to work around most of these.
Reports of XSLT's demise are much exaggerated :-) ///Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@cocoon.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@cocoon.apache.org
