RE: [xml-dev] Feasibility of "do all application coding in the XML langu

["Rushforth, Peter" <Peter.Rushforth@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Welch [mailto:andrew.j.welch@gmail.com] 
> Sent: December 2, 2008 5:03 AM
> To: Rick Jelliffe
> Cc: Mukul Gandhi; Costello, Roger L.; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Feasibility of "do all application 
> coding in the XML languages"?
> 
> > Second, on the specific case of XSLT, XSLT is very often used when 
> > there is XML-in and XML-out (or HTML out of course).  Where that is 
> > not the case, XSLT loses a lot of its perceived value.

While it requires lower-level programming, XSLT can be used on
non-XML , non-text inputs.  I wanted to get GIS programmers interested
in XSLT, and they all seem to hate XML.  So I wrote a parser for
an industry-standard binary file format called "shapefile", allowing
XSLT (saxon in my case) programmers to directly operate on the 
format.

I am working on a serializer that will allow XSLT programs to
output the result as shapefiles, hopefully that will get a few people
started.

I think there's  a lot of value in such interfaces.  It would be nice
if it didn't involve having to write a parser each time, but the cost
is not too high, I think

Cheers,
Peter Rushforth