Re: [xml-dev] SGML complexity

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

>  The problem with XSLT (at least 1.0 that i studied) is that is not
>  powerful enough for that kind of task. 

Actually XSLT1 is capable of transforming (a big enough subset of) latex
to mathml, the hard part of course being matching brackets. i've
implemented that before (without using any extension functions, so it
would run in mozilla, mainly), but it's clearly not an optimal language
for doing that (xslt2 would be a lot better but even that isn't really
optimal for parsing non regular languages where, by definition, regular
expressions are not enough)

> I am transforming trees in both cases of above; i am transforming a XML
> doc in another XML doc

XSLT is designed for transforming node trees to node trees: it
(especially in its 1.0 release) is explictly not designed for parsing
content that happens to be stored in an XML element or attribute. You
can't (or at least shouldn't) argue that a language designed to
transform XML trees is somehow deficient if it can't (easily) parse
latex or English or Fortran or any other content that the XML document
might have as character data.

David