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   Re: [xml-dev] XSLT vs. CSS (Re: Indexing)

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[Simon St.Laurent]

> At 10:26 AM 7/9/2003 -0400, Mike Kozlowski wrote:
> >My point was, and is, simply that XSLT and CSS are solving different
> >problems entirely, and don't directly compete in any way.  Is that a
> >statement with which you can agree?
>
> No.  XSLT was designed for formatting-by-transformation, while CSS was
> designed for formatting-by-annotation.
>

Well, I have to agree with this much.  XSLT was originally supposed to feed
or create FO, and FO _does_ compete (ineffectively) with CSS.  So the
package XSLT - FO is a competitor to CSS.  I said it competes ineffectively
because I am thinking more of normal browser-type applications, where any
ordinary person would have to be <expr lang='eng-gb'>mad</expr> or <expr
lang='eng-us'>nuts</expr>  to use it instead of CSS or XSLT + CSS.  Plus,
the result is much harder to screen scrape than XML-[XSLT]-CSS.

Still, where we are now is that XSLT is effectively decoupled from FO, so I
do not have to consider them as a unit.

Anyway, Simon is right in about it being easier and more pleasant for
someone to pick up enough CSS to be dangerous than it would be to pick up
XSLT.  And CSS is less dramatic in its error handling than XSLT (it just
silently does not do the bad instruction), which has its advantages.

Cheers,

Tom P






 

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