[Zope] Re: XSL and DTML was: a funny thing happened today...

[Paul Prescod]

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little out of date because the specification was not final but it isn't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