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[list4xt] Naive XSLT [was: Sun XSLT compiler]

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Leigh Dodds wrote:

> btw. Did anyone attend the presentation on the XSLT Virtual Machine [1]
> on Friday? Another very interesting session.

I have missed this one...
 
> The speaker was quite derogatory about XSLT in general
> (a 'toy' language lacking 'scientific rigour') and
> the current XSLT processors ('naive implementations').

I don't know if it's what you meant, but I think everyone has his own
personal reasons of being frustrated by XSLT depending on his prior
experiences.

To be fair with XSLT, we need to remember that "XSLT is not intended as
a completely general-purpose XML transformation language" as mentioned
in the abstract at the very beginning of the recommendation.

> >From what I understand the techniques he used in the
> project are being applied to the Oracle XSLT processor. I'm
> looking forward to see what they do with it.
>
> Anyone have any opinions/thoughts?

Personally, the best experience I have ever had with declarative
languages is Prolog and I tend to like XSLT for its Prolog like features
and to dislike it for what it doesn't implement which is of course a
very biased way of judging it.

My latest thoughts are that XSLT may lack extensibility and that a more
complete language might be needed to transform not only the syntax or
layout of XML documents, but also deal with some of their semantic.

Going further, I have the feeling that a same "reality" can be
represented using different models (such as "raw XML" for simple trees
and RDF or topic maps when it's beginning to get more complex) and that
more abstract languages could/should be able to work more transparently
on these models.

But it's not XSLT any longer ;=) ... unless maybe if you can plug
alternative predicate evaluation mechanisms to XPath.

> Is this worth an open
> source effort? (not that I'm volunteering, VM/compiler implementation
> is a black art as far as I'm concerned)

Is it XT mark II ?

Eric

> [1]. http://www.gca.org/papers/xmleurope2000/abs/s35-03.html
>
> Cheers,
>
> L.
>
> --
> Leigh Dodds, Systems Architect | "Pluralitas non est ponenda
> http://weblogs.userland.com/eclectic | sine necessitates"
> http://www.xml.com/pub/xmldeviant | -- William of Ockham

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