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Re: First working draft of XSL

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My first thought is this:
Why did they not use XML for the structure of the patterns, etc.

For example,
Here is a rule example from the new spec
<xsl:template match="book[excerpt]/author[attribute(degree)]">
...
</xsl:template>

This could have been something like:
<xsl:template>
     <match>
          <element type="book">
               <element type="excerpt"/>
               <target type="author>
                    <attribute name="degree"/>
               </target>
          </type>
     </match>
<action>
  ...
</action>
</xsl:template>

This way the xsl processor could read the stylesheet without having to
parse all of this new syntax.  We have a great tool in XML for representing
structured data so why did we have to come up with another?  Now, to read
an XSL stylesheet I need to parse all of these new delimiters and more ('/'
| '//' | '(' | ')' | '|' | '[' | ']' | ',' | '=' | '.' | '..' | '*' | '{' |
'(' |, etc.......).  All of the built in functionality of my XML parser is
of no use.  What a shame.

-Mark Overton



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