RE: [xsl] xslt and fuzzy logic

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Bryan,

I thought all your remarks were very interesting.

In particular,

At 05:40 AM 1/25/02, you wrote:
>For example I
>made [an XML-based specification language] for some of the content 
>writers, designers at our place, so that
>they could generate most of the templates for a new project, the girl using
>it most of the time, ended up by learning how to write the xslt it output
>anyway, by sitting beside me for a couple of days.

I think this is telling. Notwithstanding the difficulty many newcomers have 
with template-driven logic (due I think in no small part to bad 
instructional literature), it's actually not hard to learn at all, and can 
be quite accessible to "non-programmers". Of course, it could be that your 
"girl" just happens to be a genius (it's happened before).

We have nothing but anecdotal evidence for this; but experience does 
indicate that when used for the tasks for which it was designed, XSLT 
really is pretty darned easy. The only thing hard is writing gnarly XPaths; 
but some people think even that's fun.

XSLT is especially easy if the source data is designed well (thus obviating 
most of the need for gnarly XPaths). Which suggests that much of the reason 
XSLT is "hard" is that people just don't know how to design good XML.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
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