xml-dev - RE: Associating DSSSL style sheets with documents

[David Seibert <dseibert@sqwest.bc.ca>]

"Design Principles for XML" actually says that "the holder of a CS
bachelor's degree should be able to construct basic processing (parsing,
if not validating) machinery in less than a week".  Making that two weeks
would be pretty significant slippage.

More important: if you want XML to be widely accepted, you don't want
to enforce complications that aren't necessary for everyone.  Catalogs are
useful, but they aren't so easy to implement, so a lot of people would
prefer PIs as a less complicated alternative.  James's suggestion for a PI
form,
	<?XML-stylesheet type="text/dsssl" href="foo.dsl"?>
is concise, has all of the necessary information, and is close to the HTML
syntax to make the transition easier for HTML authors.  I can't improve on
that.

David

----------
From: 	Paul Grosso
Sent: 	Tuesday, March 18, 1997 1:48 PM
To: 	xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Subject: 	Re: Associating DSSSL style sheets with documents

> From: lee@sq.com
> 
> Remember our dirty perl hacker and the graduate student who is supposed
> to be able to write an XMLparser in a week?  That was a big goal initially.

For what it's worth...

THe desperate perl hacker was someone trying to write a perl script to
do some basic data massaging to some marked up XML.  We never had as a
goal that someone could write an XML parser in perl.

As far as the grad student, I believe we were giving them two weeks to
write an XML parser.

Finally, let's not die on our own sword here.  The main goal is to have
XML be widely accepted.  A subgoal of that is to make it relatively
easy to write an XML parser, but it still has to be worthwhile to
write that parser in the first place, or we've lost the war.  I'm
not saying that catalogs are absolutely required for XML to work,
but I do think we need to look at the big picture, not count lines
of code, to determine the right answer.

paul

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