RE: XSLT Documentation (Was: RE: How is this part of the XSLT specification to be interpreted?)

[Laurie Mann <laurie dot mann at ansys dot com>]

>Jeni Tennison wrote:
>>David Pawson wrote:
>>Stylesheet that operates on our Knuthian stylesheet and outputs
>>HTML. OK.... I'd missed that one totally.
>>Hence the schema for documentation, to permit this to be 
>>'standardised'?
>I'm missing the Knuth reference, but yes.  

Over 20 years ago, when Donald Knuth was writing The Art of Computer
Programming, he was unhappy with the current state of markup languages.
So, he wrote TeX so he'd have a better way to represent the
data for The Art of Computer Programming (especially the formulas).

One aspect of TeX that may have been unique at the time was the
concept of the format file.  The format file took the markup from
the .tex source file and presented the output differently, depending 
on the output device.  As long ago as late 1983, I helped to write
two TeX format files - one to produce typesetter output,
and another to produce ASCII screen/lineprinter output.

CSS files and XSL scripts have been really simplified TeX
format files, but the basic principle is the same - use a markup
language in a file, and use a second file to interpret the 
file depending on the output device.

At least, that's how I interpreted what David said... ;->



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