Some Reporter Thoughts

["Derek A. Neighbors" <derek gnue org>]

Carlos,

I had mentioned using Jade before as an XML conversion tool and dsssl as
its counter part for stylesheets.  I think this is still a viable option
of course.  However even the maintainer of jade (James Clark) is leaning
more towards XSLT.  

Like all XML specs its an infant and doesnt have the converters built so
we would have to build ourselves or help someone build them or wait for
them to be built.  It will be the standard of the future however.

So the question is do we use XSLT and suffer for a year or more with its
growing pains or do we use Jade and have everything already stable and
usable and in a year or two look at retrofitting to XSLT.

Here is a little tutorial from XML.com on what XSLT is:

http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/08/holman/index.html?wwwrrr_rss

Of course we could opt to do another way and write our own translation
engines. (icky)  The biggest problem I see is XSLT would probably give
us HTML fairly  quickly but not something printable like pdf, ps for
some time.  

I know in my situation that is not very viable as most clients dont want
financials that arent printable, makes it kinda hard to invoice. :)

Derek Neighbors
GNU Enterprise
http://www.gnue.org
derek@gnue.org