Re: [office] data templating (and citations)

[Bruce D'Arcus <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us>]

On Jan 31, 2007, at 1:23 PM, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> Is there some reason that XSLT (or some subset of it) was not used?

Yes. It's too difficult. It's also then tied to a particular data 
representation. The abstraction in CSL is designed to make it easier to 
create new styles, and for it also to be language-agnostic. There are 
already implementations in XSLT (2.0) and Javascript, and starts of 
versions for Python and Ruby.

MS is using XSLT to do their citation formatting in Word 2007, but the 
code they need to implement is really complex and verbose, and they 
actually simplified it a bit to avoid slowing things down too much. To 
wit, they actually don't implement author-date styles correctly (they 
concluded the processing to calculate the year disambiguation suffix 
slows an XSLT processor down enough that it's not performant enough for 
real-time formatting).

Bruce