XML News from Thursday, February 19, 2004

Jason Hunter has posted beta 10 of JDOM, a tree-based API for Processing XML with Java. There are a few minor changes and fixes since beta10 RCc 1 last week. Get your comments in on the new API now. Jason hopes to release 1.0 in about 5 weeks.


Ed Willink has posted NiceXSL, a "a conventional textual representation of XSL that is more amenable to conventional editing. XML overheads are much reduced and abbreviated syntaxes are provided for all XSLT 2.0 constructs. NiceXSL is supported by translators to and from standard XSLT." He offers the following example:

stylesheet version="17.0" {
  match (/) {
    if (system-property('xsl:version') >= 17.0)
      <xsl:exciting-new-17.0-feature>;
    else {
      <html
        <head
          <title "XSLT 17.0 required">
        >
        <body
          <p "Sorry, this stylesheet requires XSLT 17.0.">
        >
      >
    }
  }
}

Honestly, I don't think this is as clear as the usual XML syntax for XSLT. I understand to the desrie to move the control structures out of XML syntax, but why can't the literal result elements be XML? This sort of malformed, pseudo-XML markup is just plain confusing. :-(


Syntext has released Serna 1.3, a $299 payware XSL-based WYSIWYG XML Document Editor for Windows and Linux. Features include on-the-fly XSL-driven XML rendering and transformation, on-the-fly XML Schema validation, and spell checking. New features in this release include XslBricks (a rapid stylesheet development template library), NITF support, and the ability to open another document from the command line in the running instance (something I really wish Mozilla could figure out how to do).