Subject: Stepping back, part two... From: Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:12:17 -0600 (CST) |
Here's some further ramblings. This was originally a private message exchanged with Scott Lawton, but I realized there was some material here I thought would be a useful follow up to my previous message on the list. So, after a little editing, here 'tis... [Note: the context here was some technical ideas that Scott had regarding an overall approach to a transformation language, and whether a declarative approach can really work, or if it just complicates things more than anything else. His conclusion was that a declarative XML syntax could be "mapped" to a more powerful, procedural language.] Actually, I'd say you're running down a good track here. In actuality, I tend to look at it from the other side, to a point. I, for one, happen to think that the DSSSL model is fantastic. I had a bit of learning to do to understand Scheme well enough to do anything particularly useful (and I still haven't done much, as my "day job" doesn't involve this stuff... yet). However, from a purist computer science kind of standpoint, I think it's great. The casual user, on the other hand, would freak. This gets down to a fairly fundamental philosophy, and touches on the first major diatribe in my message to the list. There are users, there are programmers, and there are "gods" of programming (and a variety of shades in between). The gods are the ones who can pull of those neat tricks with assembler. The ones in the middle can assemble a decent application in C. And the users just want it to look nice in the end. Same thing here. By "layering" the technologies, you allow the gods to build the tools that allow the guys in the middle to assemble easy to use facilities for the users. [Ed. note: Perhaps "gods" is not the most appropriate term. If my use of it here offends anyone, please don't take it too hard. :) ] This is also what I was getting at with the formatting objects thing. Someone like David can put together some beautiful TeX code which can encapsulate the concept of a footnote which will end up inlined or at the foot of the page depending on certain layout criteria. He develops it, wraps it up in a formatting object "shell", and gives the user some documentation on what properties of the object they can set to control the circumstances under which the footnote gets inlined. Some middle guy can write some well designed style sheets (or even style sheet libraries, with functions that can be used at a higher level) that can be utilized (possibly with some customization) by an end user. Really, in a declarative style sheet, those declarations/tags are macros, of sorts, written in a real programming language. I asserted, some time ago, that XSL may end up to be nothing more than a pretty face for DSSSL engines, and indeed, xslj does just that. However, there may even be some gods who don't want to deal with Scheme, so what if we could slice up the layers a bit more, and provide interfaces to the core functionality of a DSSSL engine, onto which we could graft any language we want (I have dreams of CORBA here)? I haven't had a chance to look at the DOM standard much, so I can't speak on this too authoritatively, but my thought is to take that basic approach, mix in the important aspects of groves (which is a *great* model, IMHO), and establish a standard interface to implementations of this. Then, anyone could implement the DOM/grove interface on top of a variety of data representations, including in-memory, on-disk, and even databases of various types (RDBMS, ORDBMS, OODBMS, etc). Layer a couple of different transformation implementations (among other tools... transformation isn't the only thing you might want to do on top of this layer) on top, get yourself a whole plethora of formatting options tailored to different needs, and mix in a standardized architecture for pluggable formatting objects, and you've got information management nirvana. If the standards folks start with the DOM/grove level, maybe do the formatting object architecture next, and then work their way through the levels, taking the best of the best as they go, we could just have something that everyone can work with in the end (as if there would ever be an end, eh?). One last point is that I think there is a fundamental problem with the way the W3C is approaching the standards process. The Object Management Group (OMG), who is responsible for CORBA, et al, has an excellent approach to standardization. They identify a need for a technology standard, then they request proposals, generally from their members because almost every major technology company is a member. One of the most important criteria for any proposal is that it has to be based on proven concepts or technologies. No theoretical mumbo jumbo allowed. They have to see that it works first. It slows things down a bit, granted, but I think it avoids discussions like what we're going through now. -Brandon :) XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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