I do agree that how easy or difficult it is to learn a new technology depends to an extent on one's previous experience and knowledge.
But even then, I would be hard-pressed to see how XSLT would be better than Perl or a similar language when it comes to processing data in which which are not essentially to do with formatting XML documents for display.
If I wanted to, say, develop a program to lemmatise text marked up in paragraphs <p>, or parse Roman calendar dates marked up with <date>, is that something for which you would recommend using XSLT? XSLT would easily let you find that data, but I am not sure it would be easy to then process it in XSLT. Not having associative arrays or more complex data structures in XSLT makes that particularly hard, not?
Godfried
-----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Hugh Cayless Sent: 30 January 2011 03:09 To: Digital Medievalist Subject: Re: [dm-l] Teaching the TEI: your practice?
I think it's certainly true that if you're used to a procedural language like Perl, a functional(ish) language like XSLT will seem bizarre. But I'm not sure XSLT is any stranger than any other programming language to someone without programming experience.
Hugh
On Jan 28, 2011, at 5:36AM, Torsten Schassan wrote:
Dear Godfried,
Instead of teaching Perl from scratch I would give them working little programs which they can then modify to suit their needs (a recipe book approach).
although this seems to be perfectly reasonable,
I think that a procedural language like Perl is easier to grasp than XSLT and to learn.
I wonder how to prove this? Learning a (another) procedural language might be easier for someone who already learned a procedural language, but I find the way XSLT work so quite straight forward that once you understood how XML works it might be easy to understand XSLT too?! If you learned object oriented programming like Java, XML-processing with XSLT, XPath etc seems to be very similar?
But I admit it might be only me estimating this?
Best, Torsten
-- Torsten Schassan Digitale Editionen Abteilung Handschriften und Sondersammlungen Herzog August Bibliothek, Postfach 1364, D-38299 Wolfenbuettel Tel.: +49-5331-808-130 (Fax -165), schassan {at} hab.de
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