On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 22:56 -0400, Phil Shafer wrote: > [Background: I work writing software for routers (JUNOS), which uses > an XML-based API to allow extensive access to our configuration > database and operational command output. We've used libxslt > for web-oriented transformations (XML->HTML) in our product line, > and have recently used XSLT to allow customer-specific constraints > to be applied to the configuration database.] > > When we exposed our XSLT scripting ability to customers, we found them > quite hostile to xslt syntax. I looked around for alternatives, but > didn't find anything that really fit with libxslt, my needs, and my > customers' preferences.
Sam Wilmott gave a talk at Extreme Markup in Montréal this August about an alternate syntax he has worked on, inspired by Python. XML Query, of course, uses a non-XML syntax. But there are a lot of XSLT tricks that make use of the fact that XSLT is represented in XML, and there was a talk (also at Extreme Markup) about higher-order programming in XSLT using some such tricks. I don't think it's time for us (W3C) to standardise a non-XML language for XSLT, but I think the experimentation is probably healthy. I'd be happier if it were based on XSLT 2, which has some features to reduce the need e.g. to write XSLT transformations that produce XSLT which, when interpreted,... etc etc., and hence XSLT 2 might be easier in practice to decouple from the XML representation. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org _______________________________________________ xslt mailing list, project page http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/ [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xslt
