please comment on technologies

[andrew cooke]

Alex Martelli said:
>> Ok, I thought XSL was the definitive answer to all templating needs, but
>> you don't seem very excited about it ?
>
> I guess I shouldn't put my name to this -- it's not a "respectable"
> thing to say, and might inveigle me in flamewars I'd rather avoid --
[...]

not sure if this is an oblique reference to my comments about it being
difficult to sell XSL in another post, but i wasn't looking for a
flamewar, just relating direct experience.  i used XSL in my current
project and cannot get the client to use it.  instead they are writing
specific chunks of VB code (with hand rolled XML parsers!) to rearrange
data.  they were the people i was thinking of, not you!

if you've never used XSL then another reason to avoid it is that it can be
fiendishly tricky to solve some problems (even if it is turing complete). 
it's not a general purpose language by any means.  but it does rearrange
xml well (and i did manage to write something that verified the checksum
of chilean ID numbers once ;-)

andrew

-- 
http://www.acooke.org/andrew