Gary King discusses some
issues of XSLT. He concludes:
I still feel as if there is less here than meets the eye; that it ought to be possible to express these graph-transformations more elegantly and with less fuss and bother.
To me, the only interesting part of XSLT isn't XSLT itself, it's the embedded XPath where XSLT's power comes from. XPath is a pair of scissors for cutting out the nodes of an XML document instance you're interested in and is about as powerful (and hence horrible to get right) as regular expressions (although it's something completely different, of course). XSLT is just the framework which provides a relatively boring set of instructions and control-flow operations. And it's "clean functional" design only gets in the way every so often. Sure, coming from a Prolog and Lisp background, I know all the tricks to work around the hassle, but quite often it would be way easier to just set that damned variable *again*. If I want to do clean functional programming, I know where I can find a language without that XML syntax, thanks. Give me the unclean intermix of programming styles offered by Common Lisp anyday, please.
Being a Lisp guy just like Gary, I would be happy to use
a language with parenthesis
, as I have to do XML transformations quite often and the intermix of elements from different namespaces (XSLT namespace and target namespace) is mostly a pain to read and write. Using
xslide, an Emacs mode for XSLT, eases the pain a considerable bit, but it still isn't really fun. And sometimes I need to hack XSLT in a proprietary system which only provides editor capabilities that know nothing about XML (think notepad-style editing capabilities) and then XSLT suddenly has the next most horrible syntax imaginable. However, the corporate world has its own rules and to be fair, the major benefit of XSLT is that you have one standard
syntax for XML transformations rather than having xyz numbers of incompatible library APIs.
Update: Also in response to Gary, David Lichteblau pointed out his approach to
(macro-)pre-processing XSLT stylesheets to overcome some of Gary's problems.
