IMG_9959 Originally uploaded by markmorga.

Saturday morning came awfully early after being out so late Friday night, but I managed to meet Anton on time.

The first session of the day was “Why XSLT is sexy”. I was curios about this since I had mostly written off the suitability of XSLT as a means of making good presentation of XML. It just always seemed like there were easier ways to solve the problem. My notes were:

Notes:

• First slide: Putting Lipstick on a Pig
• Joe Orr, Lindsay Simon
• XSLT running on XML DOM parser in browser
• Unlike CSS can add new elements to the page
• XSL is a functional language - not procedural
• Fast processor in most browsers (Safari lagging)
• ActiveWidgetGrid
• bandwidth saving advantages - dl the XSL once, process many XML transactions (like AJAX ezchanges)
• AJAX-S
• XML Binding Language
• Freja and Formbuilder: MVC for Javascript, XSL is a View
• Sarissa: presents same syntax for all browsers
• AspectXML
• BrowserBasedXML.com
• detects browser w/ XSL engine and transfers only the appropriate XSL file - easier to keep browser specific XSL separate)
• GRDDL: part of the semantec web project
• simile.mit.edu/welkin
• The functional programming aspect of XSL is the big deal - productivity wise - don’t write the code as though procedural.
• Screenbook maker
• IE crashed on the presenter (oops)
• Uses Xalan, XSLT, XPath
• LEO - Literate Editor w/ Outline (written in Python) - seems like it would be cool for CSS editing also - good code block folding capabilities
• MyTimes.com
• Custom widgets - looks like an alternative to Java Portlets
• Speed advantages compared to quirks mode in the browser
• Michael Kay
• www.screenbooks.net/sxsw