Subject: [xsl] RE: String manipulation in XSLT From: JBryant@xxxxxxxxx Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 13:41:46 -0500 |
I wasn't (quite :-) present at the creation either, but I do think Jay rather overstates the point: it's not really true that "no one perceived much need for string manipulation". Rather, it was envisioned that there'd be other tools (Perl, anyone?) better suited to that. XSLT 1.0 was supposed to be a clean, lean and mean subset and optimization of *some* of the things that made its predecessor, DSSSL, so powerful, while fixing those things about DSSSL (the syntax) that made it impossible for most people. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I wasn't there for the earliest days, but I've been fiddling with XSL since early 2000 (when I worked with Jeremy Richman at Interleaf) and have been using it heavily for the last 15 months. Back then, I got the impression that people thought XSLT would be one tool in a chain and that other tools would likely be used for processing both before and after the XSLT stage. I suppose I should have been more explicit when I wrote that " no one perceived much need for string manipulation" and wrote that "no one perceived much need for string manipulation in XSLT". I think human nature naturally reaches for a one-tool approach, so XSLT has gotten quite a bit of pressure to do more things. And now (the draft of) XSLT 2.0 has much stronger string manipulation and new regular expression abilities and grouping-centric instructions such as for-each-group. (My apologies for the spam tag in my earlier post, by the way. Our idiot spam detector both wrongly tags things that aren't spam and doesn't tag many things that are spam. I'd rather do without it, but that's not my choice.) Jay Bryant Bryant Communication Services (presently consulting at Synergistic Solution Technologies)
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