Saturday, 31 May 2003

XSLT and XSL:FO After three weeks of using XSLT & XSLFO in anger, I have a couple of thoughts on the matter. The delineation of data and programing language based on the namespace of the xml tag is interesting, but doesn't lead to a lot of visual differentiation. XSLT is a week tree manipulation language. They have stuffed up some obvious programming language basics. The template namespace appears at first blush, to be flat. They provide a mode differentiator to allow multiple matching templates based on match templates, but also being able to scope templates would be advantageous. XSLT is, by design, verbose. This is a language that you either are going to spend for ever typing stuff in, or you need some serious editor assistance. Unfortunately, it is not technically possibly to define a dtd for it. It would be nice if someone put together an XSchema for it, because then IntelliJ's IDEA could probably do a much better job of helping me type this crap in. XSLFO is verbose. It was obviously designed to be both hard to code in directly, and hard to implement properly. Thus FOP, the prominent XSLFO implementation, has some serious missing chunks. Like the ability to justify text blocks. After being brought up in LaTeX, XSL:FO is just primitive. Honestly, is 2000 lines of XSL really appropriate to be able to define a five page print report? I think not. Or, at least, this is an area where a UI would be nice. But, it is not like this is an area without some serious players already present.... 10,231 lines in data source xml file, 2,955 lines in xslt, 5,001 lines in resultant xsl:fo, 8 pages in generated pdf. Hmmm. 12:16:31 PM

Sticking around. Remind me to test drive Prevayler soon. It looks sexy. 12:13:41 PM

Help... Funniest Thing Ever!. Must read: The History of The Internet. WARNING! Be prepared to wet your pants laughing. [/dev/null [Cameron]] 12:12:38 PM

ASM ASM, nice little bytecode library. Is BCEL wearing you down with it's massive API (and those repulsive underscores in symbol-names)? Have a look at ASM. Nice, clean, minimalistic API that seems to do all the things you need it to. [jutopia] Hmmm, pretty. 11:09:19 AM

CMS aren't worth the electrons... Udell speaks. Udell speaks: Here are the slides from Jon Udell's keynote at OSCOM from today. Well worth a read. He quotes: Brent's Law of CMS URLs: the more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs [Matthew Langham's Radio Weblog] So true. 10:20:10 AM

© Copyright 2003 Brett Morgan.