On Sun, 2013-06-30 at 09:49 +0200, Wolfgang Laun wrote:
[...]

> Conclusions
> 
> Perl's CPAN is a great asset. Certainly, the quality of its offerings varies,
> but the packages are tested and users report on their experience. (Why
> doesn't XSLT have anything like it?)

XSLT 3 will have package support, and CXAN will be more useful then.
It's coming, albeit a decade on the late side.

> Ken used a proprietary (?) solution for embedding documentation that can
> be extracted into HTML. Now that's great, but it is a solitary answer to the
> problem.

Not proprietary but a Ken-only convention.

>  Perl's pod is a somewhat clunky solution but it is supported with
> a rich toolset, along with the Perl distribution. I consider the
> existence of a documentation format that is defined along with the
> language as "state of
> the art" and essential for sustainable SW development.

I would encourage you to join the expath and exslt efforts - there's an
expath W3C community group.

> XSLT is "special purpose" for XML handling and consequently easy to use,
> but it isn't better than the average language for string processing.

"better" is subjective, or at least contextual. A strength of XML is
that you can do text processing even if you do not consider yourself to
be a "hard-core programmer". For many such people it's easier to work in
XSLT than in Perl or Python.

For my part I almost always use Perl to do "upconversions" into XML; I
then use an XML parser (e.g. "xmllint --noout" fits well with "make") at
every stage where I expect XML to be well-formed.

Which Perl module did you use to write XML?

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml