Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> OK, in the spirit of tit-for-tat classical references; when Dionysius
> unexpectedly transformed Acoetes' crew into beasts, they only had themselves to
> blame. No one made them try to shanghai an innocent, harmless-looking lad into
> slavery.
The references were not intended to be gratuitous. If XSLT is deracinated from XML
the lexical ground, then it loses the strength it would otherwise draw from that
syntactic bedrock. Antaeus is the usual metaphor for such enervation. If in
vanquishing Elliotte only by proclaiming that the stuff of XSLT is not, strictly,
XML, then you have won this battle at the cost of the only power with which you
might win more important battles later, just as Pyrrhus' victory was hollow because
he squandered his army to get it.
However, notice that as to 4Suite I agree with Evan Lenz that 'XInclude processing
in the context of 4XSLT is perfectly fine' because I see 4Suite as essentially a
pipelining framework. The problem is, to score a TKO against Elliotte, resorting to
the draconian (oops--more reference) measure of defining XSLT divorced from XML.
Respectfully,
Walter Perry
