Re: [xslt] Any interest in an alternative syntax for XSLT?

[Phil Shafer <phil juniper net>]

Daniel Veillard writes:
>  Is SLAX defined independantly ?  Do you have stable pointers to the 
>spec ? 

SLAX is my creation, and the only spec was attached to the original
email.  I'll htmlify it, put it on a web server, and post a link.

What sort of peer review do you have in mind?

>    - this open the door to other 'I want my own representation in'
>      which like in the case of 'binary XML' is not something I feel
>      great about
>    - the size and stability of that code base and associated specification

Both reasonable concerns.  The "me too" issue works against me,
since there have been other attempts at defining alternative syntaxes,
none of which has really gone anywhere.  Part of my desire to get
this code into the libxslt base is to increase exposure and uptake
for this syntax.

The other view, of course, would be that the reason past attempts have
failed is that the problem isn't that big and doesn't need solving.  I
disagree with this, and find working in slax much more straight
forward, even after working with xslt for 4-5 years.  Most of the
issues with scripts are related to xpath expressions, and slax keeps
these expressions from getting lost in the angle brackets and
attributes.

The second concern can only be addressed by review of the slax syntax
and code, hopefully by the libxslt group.  I'm hoping to see slax
being integrated in the source base with a "--with-slax" configure
option.

Thanks,
 Phil