RE: [xsl] Practicality of Separating Data from Presentation

["Conal Tuohy" <conalt at paradise dot net dot nz>]

Wendell Piez wrote:

> FWIW, the notion that XSL is broken since it "doesn't
> separate data from
> presentation" is kind of funny in view of the fact that it
> was designed to
> be a presentation-tier thing ... run in the client, target FO
> etc. ...;
> it's only because it's so darned versatile that everyone's
> using it in the
> middle tier at all....

I agree, and I'd also point out that the same could be said of many other
languages. Is C++ broken? Is Java broken? Is VBScript broken? hmmm ....
maybe VBScript IS broken ;-)

As you point out, XSLT is very versatile, and can therefore be used in
misguided ways, but this is not really a "feature" of the language itself.
Actually XSLT can be a very powerful tool for frameworks that separate data
and presentation. You can have a "middle-tier" XSLT and a
"presentation-tier" XSLT and pipe the output of one into the other. Apache
Cocoon http://xml.apache.org/cocoon is an example of this kind of framework.

Con


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