[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date]

Re: [xsl] Two recommendations: (1) Call it XSLT "program" (not XSLT "stylesheet"), (2) stop treating XSLT as an acronym

---

---

"Costello, Roger L." <costello@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Hi Folks,
>
> Note: In the following I am just talking about XSLT. I am not talking about XSL-FO.
>
> XSLT is a programming language. It is used to create programs. Personally, I never use XSLT to perform styling. When was the last time you used XSLT to set a font color or background color? I use CSS to do styling. Thus, I come to my first recommendation.
>
> RECOMMENDATION #1
>
> When you write or talk about an XSLT document, call it a program. Don't call it a stylesheet. For example, say this: "I wrote an XSLT program to screen-scrape Yahoo Finance." Don't say this: "I wrote an XSLT stylesheet to screen-scrape Yahoo Finance."
>
>
> It is regrettable that XSLT is an acronym standing for XML _Stylesheet_ Language Transformations. As described above, rarely (if ever) is XSLT used for styling. Thus, the acronym is completely misleading. This leads to my second recommendation.
>
> RECOMMENDATION #2
>
> Stop treating XSLT as an acronym. It is just the name of a programming language, just as Java is the name of a programming language.
>
> Comments?

I don't really like calling it a program. It depends on the context. How
about calling one of these programs a transformation specification instead of calling it a
script.

XSLT is not a general purpose language. There are sometimes reasons to
make a distinction between languages like XSLT and languages like
Haskell, say.

Kendall

---