* Daniel Friesen lists@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