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Evan Lenz wrote:
> Jonathan Borden wrote:
> > A somewhat long time ago (i.e. circa 2000) I wrote a little XML
> > editor which
> > compiled itself into XSLT http://www.openhealth.org/editor/. Work on
this
> > was merged into the XUpdate progect of xml:db
> > http://www.xmldb.org/xupdate/xupdate-wd.html. I think that the
> > XSLT _syntax_
> > is perfectly capable of _expressing_ updates, and any issues are left to
> > implementations.
>
> XEditor has been an influence in what we've been discussing on the
> TransQuery list w.r.t XSLT as an XML update language. The key distinction
> between the two approaches is that XEditor hides complexity of XSLT
> implementation via preprocessing a la Schematron, while TransQuery update
> hides complexity of XSLT implementation via xsl:import (thereby
> transparently using pure XSLT 1.0).
>
Laziness is the mother of invention. I hacked it together without much
thought as I was finding myself writing more and more XSLT transforms to do
essentially the same thing: change a few XML elements fairly deep within a
tree. This sort of document editing makes for really ugly Javascript DOM
code, and hacking out XSLT transforms by hand in notepad gets tedious pretty
quickly. The other sort of place where it is helpful to use a little XML
language is auto generating HTML forms.
Of course my minimal knowledge of query languages has been quickly and far
surpassed by all the work going on in XML Schema, XML Query etc. so I am
afraid I have little to add to the current design of these languages (aside
from my opinion when something is too complicated or hard to use). On the
other hand, when you don't even know what the edge cases _are_ its hard to
get stuck on the wrong side of the 99/1% divide :-)
Jonathan
Jonathan
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