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RE: XSLT vs JSP

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Hi Chuck,

Chuck said:
Didier, you explain that their scope is similar, but I don't *think* I
said otherwise, I said that xsl was simpler, in that it has less
language features to remember, and is simpler to do things in.  I
did not mean to comment at all on scope, although, if I had, I think I
would have said XSL's scope is larger.  DSSSL is meant to be used to
format documents, and XSL is meant to do that AND to format web pages
also.  The scope of usage, I thought, was greater for XSL.  Regardless,
the point I was making was for simplicity, not scope.  Did you slip in
writing that last line, or did you really mean to comment about scope?

Didier says:
I personally think that XSL is not necessarily simpler than DSSSL. I would
say however that the expression language of XSL is simpler for those used to
procedural languages like for instance java (a majority of the development
population is used to procedural languages). So, the syntax of scheme may be
too foreign for most of the people. Thus, on the expression language side,
XSL win. The other point is the rule by example which could lead to more
intuitive constructs especially for XML to HTML transformation. However, on
the other side, if we don't use the expression language, DSSSL is about as
hard to learn as CSS. And a DSSSL style sheet could ressemble a lot a CSS
style sheet. What make it difficult is the expression language, not the
style part. Thus, with the exception of the expression language they share
about the same level of learning difficulty. Also, I forgot, some XSL query
constructs are definitively more practical than their DSSSL counterpart.

About the on-line versus print stuff, I am sorry to tell you that this is
false. DSSSL spec and current implementations do support both the page model
and the on-line model respectively represented by the simple-page-sequence
(or an other page more complex page model) and the Scroll flow objects. The
last one, the scroll flow object represent the browser window. Thus, DSSSL
is adapted since its beginning to both page based model (print or formats
like PDF) and the browser model. So the scope of usage for both XSL and
DSSSL is the same. The difference is only a question of marketing and
community support :-)

regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.netfolder.com


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