Greetings

Some flamage (start of message) and one advice (end of the message).

This is my anecdotical, highly opinionated take on XSLT:

ME : "Looks we have to adjust this another bit..."
Coworker: "Do you think we can get this to work before XML falls out of fashion?"

Basically, it looks like every time I fish out my XSLT, the task at hand is either:

  1. Nothing a good CSS could not handle

    OR

  2. Nothing I would not rather do with a glue language directly from the DOM.
And my question would be, why do we need a highly idiosyncrasiac, verbose, devious programming language for transformations? How is it superior to direct interaction with the DOM?
Besides it appears to have a slew of limitations - just by looking at the mailing list, it appears that every tiny departure from the text book examples require some extension (Saxon is often mentioned).
So I have long ceased to try to wrestle with XSLT. When CSS is not up to snuff I usually do (on Win32): 

use Win32::OLE;
my $parser=Win32::OLE->new('msxml.DOMdocument');
#...do my stuff

[download]
On linux, you can get something similar from either the perl XML modules OR the Xerces-C module.

AxKit has a thing that is called (I think) XpathScript, which does much what XSLT promises to do, but with much saner syntax and looks (IMHO). I have never used it, but it would probably be my choice after going straight to the DOM.

Cheers,
alf
--
You can't have everything: where would you put it?

In reply to Re: XML documentation formatting and transformations by alien_life_form
in thread XML documentation formatting and transformations by John M. Dlugosz

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