The book is an excellent reference for those using XSLT or wanting to learn.
XSLT is an open standard so the OS you use it on is pretty irrelevant. Two
projects I am currently working on are entirely build in Java (JSP),
developed on NT boxes and deployed on Unix servers. XSLT is used to output
the HTML. To keep the marketing folks happy we regularly take a snapshot of
the XML generated by the application and use it in a static prototype using
the same XSLT files as the application. The marketing folk use IE with MSXML
3 to do their presentations. So OS/platform issue at all realy.

Perry Molendijk

----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Kay
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2001 5:03 PM
Subject: RE: [xsl] Question about Michael Kay's book


> I'd like to know whether its
> equally valuable
> for those of us who live without MS, i.e. no IIS, no IEx, no
> Windows OS, etc.

The bulk of the book tries to steer completely clear of any
platform-dependencies, except in Chapter 8 where it discusses extension
functions in Java and JavaScript. The book is about the language, not about
the environment you run it in.

There's one appendix on the MSXML environment, one on Saxon, one on Xalan,
one on Oracle, and one that tries to survey the rest of the product space.
The MSXML appendix is the longest, not just because of the likely level of
interest, but also because running XSLT in the client opens up a lot of
possibilities that aren't there with the other products.

> For example, how well does it cover Cocoon?

Rather superficially, I'm afraid. I tried to give it some coverage but found
it a remarkably complex environment that was difficult to do justice to in a
few pages. And a lot of it seemed to have little to do with XSLT. I didn't
have time or space for a thorough description so decided to content myself
with a few paragraphs that tried to explain briefly what Cocoon is and what
it isn't. I found even that was quite difficult...

Mike Kay
Software AG




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