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

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 22:56 -0400, Phil Shafer wrote:
>     [Background: I work writing software for routers (JUNOS), which uses
>     an XML-based API to allow extensive access to our configuration
>     database and operational command output.  We've used libxslt
>     for web-oriented transformations (XML->HTML) in our product line,
>     and have recently used XSLT to allow customer-specific constraints
>     to be applied to the configuration database.]
> 
> When we exposed our XSLT scripting ability to customers, we found them
> quite hostile to xslt syntax.  I looked around for alternatives, but
> didn't find anything that really fit with libxslt, my needs, and my
> customers' preferences.

Sam Wilmott gave a talk at Extreme Markup in Montréal this August about
an alternate syntax he has worked on, inspired by Python.

XML Query, of course, uses a non-XML syntax.

But there are a lot of XSLT tricks that make use of the fact that
XSLT is represented in XML, and there was a talk (also at Extreme
Markup) about higher-order programming in XSLT using some such
tricks.

I don't think it's time for us (W3C) to standardise a non-XML
language for XSLT, but I think the experimentation is probably
healthy.  I'd be happier if it were based on XSLT 2, which has
some features to reduce the need e.g. to write XSLT transformations
that produce XSLT which, when interpreted,... etc etc., and hence
XSLT 2 might be easier in practice to decouple from the XML
representation.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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