Joseph Kesselman :
[ <xsl:stylesheetor <xsl:transform? ]
I have the impression that this was a bit of politics over "but if
it isn't being used to render something for viewing, will calling
it a stylesheet confuse people"... and the outcome appears to be,
as I suggested, that this bit of extra flexibility really wasn't
necessary after all.
My impression is that the sightly confusing vocabulary comes from early
days when XSLT and CSS were seen as competing rather than complementary
technologies within the W3C. Those days are over, and since as often as
not, the XSLT I write generates <linkelements to CSS, since most people
associate "stylesheet" with CSS, and since "transform" is both available
and intuitive, I have resolved never to use "stylesheet" for XSLT.
I agree that having two designations for the same concept is more
harmful than helpful. But if one of the two were to be dropped from
some future version of XSLT, I hope it will be "stylesheet". It is quite
hard enough to explain how all that works together without using the same
word for two quite different things, which causes a much greater
difficulty than using two words for the same thing.
--
Johannes Baagoe