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From: "Artur Bialecki" <artur@digitalfairway.com>
To: <cocoon-dev@xml.apache.org>
Subject: RE: [RT] the quest for the perfect template language
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 09:45:00 -0500
Organization: digitalfairway corporation
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefano Mazzocchi [mailto:stefano@apache.org] 
> Sent: April 3, 2003 4:19 PM
> To: cocoon-dev@xml.apache.org
> Subject: Re: [RT] the quest for the perfect template language
> 
> My point is: if you need it, great, use it. But if you don't, 
> why should 
> you impose your syntax upon us?
> 
> What I would like is simply a non-xml syntax for XSLT. RDF is 
> going to 
> have it (another interesting concept totally ruined by the 
> un-friendlyness of their syntax). RelaxNG is going to have it (thank 
> &deity; it's better than DTD's syntax!).
> 
> Why shouldn't XSLT?

I agree that simple clean XSLT syntax would be nice. We have 350+
XSL files (we use Cocoon as front end to an enterprise app)
and maintaining them is not easy for people who wrote them and
very hard for people who see them for the first time. 
The conversion between simple and XML representation would have to
be bidirectional. Also, extensions are very useful for parsing and
formatting
dates, times, etc. so I would see a need for expressing them in the 
simple representation as well. 

Artur...