Re: ITP: xslj, a XSL processor (XSL is one of the stylesheet format of XML)
On Saturday 26 June 1999, at 20 h 33, the keyboard of Adam Di Carlo
<adam@onshore.com> wrote:
> Practically, most of the problems with actually dealing with Jade boil
> down to learning curve (a lot of people are learning SGML or XML at
> the same time), or problems with the backends. Jade backends are not
> always what they might be.
It is certainly the main problem with full-SGML. Unlike HTML, where the
Ordinary User can actually read a few "HTML for pithecanthropes" pages in the
morning and have its Web server working in the afternoon, full-SGML needs
twenty years of careful study to be effective.
The lack of good tutorials, the lack of readable reference materials, add to
the problem.
No wonder XML had such a marketing success (the technical success is yet to
come). Not only it is free (see Bart Schuller's message) but you can write a
parser in an hour, you can read and understand the spec, etc.
> CSS is just an annotation model -- you just attach style to rectangles
> of text. You can't use it to do things you might do in DSSSL or XSL.
> For instance, you couldn't create a TOC in the stylesheet with CSS.
Yes but CSS, like HTML and unlike DSSSL, can be learned in less than a day.
Whatever its proponents say, XSL in its full power does not seem much easier
than DSSSL.
> > The only widely accepted XML formatting standard is to use XSLT to
> > generate HTML. Both print and native browser rendering is currently in
> > turmoil.
>
> Actually, you can use jade/DSSSL to render XML or SGML.
For XML, the Perl/Python/Java hacker will probably find much easier to write a custom parser (which is, in effect, a stylesheet hardcoded into the parser) than to learn DSSSL. With tools like XML::Parser for Perl or XP for Java, it is a piece of cake.
It is probably not realistic for a huge DTD like DocBk, but for most DTDs, it is a very convenient way.
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