Relationship between XSLT and ASP (was Re: asp problem)

["John Lam" <drjflam at hotmail dot com>]

While this reply won't solve your particular problem, there are interesting 
issues here. XSLT is very much like ASP in many respects. ASP is really 
about allowing developers to bind static and dynamic content together using 
the same programming language.

For example, your ASP code:

<a href="page.asp?member=<%= strMemberNo %>">

contains static and dynamic content (the dynamic content is enclosed within 
the <% ... %> characters.

This would be similar to something like:

<a href="page.asp?member={position()}"/>

in XSLT. Where the dynamic content is enclosed in an attribute value 
template which contains the XPath expression position().

In the latest MSXSL technology preview, they provide an XSLT ISAPI extension 
for a web server: 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/webtechnology/xml/xslisapi.asp which 
essentially makes XSLT the server-side "ASP" technology.

I think that XSLT could be a really shit-kicking server-side scripting 
language- especially once MS allows us to get XML streams directly into the 
XSLT engine from ADO recordsets or from SQL Server 2000 queries. This will 
allow direct transforms of XML streams into relevant HTML for down-level 
browsers, or filter-through schema conversion types of transformations as 
well.

Has anyone else reached a similar kind of conclusion? Does this relate 
similarly to the Cocoon efforts at Apache?

Cheers,
-John

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