* Daniel Friesen <lists(a)nadir-seen-fire.com> [Mon, 06 Dec 2010 08:13:04
-0800]:
PHP -> XSL doesn't quite feel like much of an
improvement in terms of
cutting down on the verbose redundant code boilerplate required to
insert something.
ie: <xsl:value-of select="title"/> doesn't look much better than
<?php
$this->text("title") ?>, as opposed to {$title|escape:html}.
XQuery
code looks much less bloated, much like your last example {} :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery
however I am not sure it is equally as powerful and probably is not well
supported in PHP :-(
And I'm not sure how XSL handles html vs. text, we
have stuff you want
to htmlescape and stuff you want to output raw.
Using an XSL lib also doesn't play nicely with things like calling a
function to generate tooltips or fetch something from the i18n system.
Also XSL wants tags to be properly closed, while in HTML5 they have
decided a "human-friendly" way of tag soup.
Unfortunately I think any designer we can convince to
build a
MediaWiki
skin will probably dislike using XSL as a template
language more than
using PHP as a template language.
I wonder whether XQuery is a good alternative but it seems it does not
catch up :-( The same was for XSL (XSL exists for ages, yet it didn't
gain a huge popularity - perhaps, because it's tiresome to type
statements in tags).
Dmitriy