Re: [Refdb-users] Re: nitpicking (element ordering in risx)

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Bruce D'Arcus writes:
 > > And what is the relation of RIS/RISX/RefDB to Bibliofile?
 > 
 > Markus is involved in development discussions of Bibliofile, as am I.  
 > It is an xslt-based formatting engine designed to be 
 > DTD/schema-independent, both with respect to bib data and document 
 > format.  Noone has done this before, so it's bleeding edge, and Markus 
 > is still skeptical it will work adequately.

xslt is said to be a complete programming language so it will work
eventually, given that someone puts enough sweat in it. I'm skeptical
whether it is  wise to do the raw->cooked transformation in xslt. As
we're not looking at anything specific to XML (in the case of RefDB,
the data to convert are not XML, but SQL query results), any language
with a better signal-to-noise ratio than xslt will provide better and
easier to maintain programs (think C or Perl). For me it is simply a
matter of chosing the right tool for the right job. You can use Emacs
as a web server (google for it, it's fun!) but no one would claim this
stacks up well against Apache.

 >  I really hope it does, and 
 > that RefDB can use it as its formatting engine too.

I strive for compatibility at the stylesheet level.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
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