Evan Simpson wrote:
I can't claim to know a lot about XSL, but the tutorials I glanced at gave me the definite impression that it is very similar (in functionality) to DTML! The major differences seem to be that an XSL document is also a valid XML document, and that XSL has a heavy declarative/pattern-matching flavor, while DTML is purely procedural code embedded in HTML.
All true.
Of course, there's the (currently theoretical) difference that XSL rendering of XML can happen on the client end.
Not entirely theoretical. IE 5.0 has client-side XSL rendering. It's a little out of date because the specification was not final but it isn't too bad for experimentation.
Contrast this with DTML, which acts rather like a single XSL node,
I think you mean "single XSLT template rule." XSLT has recently been reorganized so that it allows you to use it with a single rule, without declaring the xsl:stylesheet and xsl:template instructions. In other words it can now look a LOT like DTML. I look forward to when I can do DTML-type stuff in a standards conformant way.
except that it has many flow control tags and can call on other methods.
XSL has some flow control tags also: if/then/else, for-each etc. Not as many as Zope. XSL also has a notion of "foreign functions" that you can use to call into your underlying environments implementation.
More procedural, in other words. I suspect, given Zope's new XML expertise, that you could write an XSL renderer in DTML (with a few well-chosen external methods) :-D
Is that writing an XSL renderer "in DTML" or in Python? Paul Prescod