Dear Log,
Friday I puttered around, grinding my teeth about the construction noise from across the street (buzzsaws and jackhammers), until I came to my senses and took a walk, and brought my laytop. I ended up at the diner, where I ended up sitting and reading up on XSL, and experimenting with it. My verdict: it's an odd language. I think of it as like the /bin/sh of XML -- it's nearly ubiquitous (in that it's built into MSIE and Mozilla), but I wouldn't exactly want to write an Eliza bot in it. But it was fun to play with, to satisfy (probably permanently) my curiosity about the language. Also: iced tea, and diner food. Homph homph homph homph homph.
I came home and ended up talking with Coraline about bending space. The clever Coraline finds it fascinating (and presumably not implausible), but I am still skeptical. I mean, it's all fun and games until you screw up and generate enough gamma rays to sterilize the solar system! Oops.
XSLT is great, so long as you don't try and push it too far. For turning one bit of xml into another slightly different bit of xml, it's great. For much else, it might be able to do it, but it's damned hard work.
It's easy to get very frustrated with XSLT unless you play to it's strengths. Like all good tools really.
-Dom
Re:XSLT Problem Space
brev on 2004-07-19T05:01:52
xslt is also fine for transforming xml into simple non-xml formats like CSV.
