Hi everyone,
I am fairly new to learning about xsl and xml, but one thing I have noticed is that anyone offering a tutorial or lesson on it seems to think that its the most incredible invention ever made.
I don't.
I'm wondering what everyone else thinks. I know the smart answer is, use it if you need it and don't if you don't. But seeing as everyone is going on about it so much, and I really can't see the big deal, I'm beginning to wonder if either I am missing something or just making it to hard for myself
Heres my situation. My boss is the MD of a localisation company - they localise software and training manuals and so on (translation mainly). Now, my boss has got it into his head that xml is just the
bees knees and should be applied anywhere and everywhere. He wants me to make him a multilingual content management system using xml and probably xsl. The thing is, I don't really think he needs a content management system as such. We only have like twenty pages and sure it would be maybe a small help to be able to keep foreign language pages in lock step with the master (uk) site, but that could hopefully be done in an easier way.
Can you think of any reason to do this in xsl? The other thing is he really wants xml built into the system somehow. All I'm going to do is support the retrieval of relational data as xml. Although I can't even see him needing that really.
I understand that it would be helpful to seperate presentation and content - exactly what xslt achieves. But it just strikes me that the price is way way to high - sure it can seperate, but its hard! I can't even make simple html docs using xslt. And I doubt many other people can either. So, I'm pretty worried that if I were to somehow manage to make a decent website using xslt, anyone who wanted to make even the simplest of changes would need to know a pretty difficult, hard to understand and obscure technology.
Does anyone else think the xslt hype is just that - hype. Sure it would be ok for sites that are maintained by legions of programmers and it would be rather useful if you wanted people with phones to look at your site - but lets be honest - how many of you think that your site would be great on a 2 inch screen.
Can anyone foresee any advantages to using xml in such a small multilingual context?
Please share your thoughts and lets see if we can't get down to the bottom line
Kindest Regards to Everyone
Simon