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At 22:08 09/08/2001 -0400, Mike.Champion@S... wrote: >3) XSLT in particular has a good story (on paper, and increasingly in >reality) for supporting changing output requirements. You need to support >some HTML subset or WML for wireless? Write another stylesheet. You need to >put out the data in your industry's new XML schema? Write another >stylesheet. In a programming/imperative architecture, you get to write the >same code over and over again; OK, maybe you can modularize your code well >enough to do this cleanly (after a few trips around the spiral model or >after a few Extreme Programming refactorizations), but you still need a >programmer skilled in your specific environment to do each new output >format. XSLT editing tools are getting good enough so that it's not a big >stretch to think that a person with ordinary web design skills will be able >to do the stylesheets in the near future. If only the world were so simple! In my experience, be it styling for WML or schema-to-schema transformations you hit the limits of any sandboxed, declarative syntax such as XSLT really, really fast. XSLT is an example of a 20/80 point technology:-) It gets you 80% towards a solution quickly but makes the remaining 20% either impossible or so hard that the time it takes to get that last 20% done, wipes out the gains you made on the first 80%! Sean
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