Sorry guys, I’ve been tied up recently and not had a chance to reply.
So in total agreement with Will about Templates. For-each’s will get you so far but if you want to keep things simple, neat and readable I would suggest Templates.
On with Will’s point
See this is the problem with XSL, its a great transformation language in need of a good pipeline framework around it. I’m using Cocoon for lots of my serious XSL building and it makes things so much quicker and I don’t ever have to worry about replicating programming concepts. Also XSL 2.0 now has things like regex and the ability to do many to many transformations without a pipeline framework like Cocoon. Yes you need Saxon 8+ but it comes on Java and .Net now, so there’s no excuse now.
Good point about processor overhead with my for-each, its a old habit of mine.
To the earlier points, I was tempted to put in a part about the difference between Client-side and Server-side transformations. Client-side is useful when you have control over the feed or use javascript but ideally server-side makes more sense for most usage.
Ian Forrester
Sorry guys, I’ve been tied up recently and not had a chance to reply.
So in total agreement with Will about Templates. For-each’s will get you so far but if you want to keep things simple, neat and readable I would suggest Templates.
On with Will’s point
See this is the problem with XSL, its a great transformation language in need of a good pipeline framework around it. I’m using Cocoon for lots of my serious XSL building and it makes things so much quicker and I don’t ever have to worry about replicating programming concepts. Also XSL 2.0 now has things like regex and the ability to do many to many transformations without a pipeline framework like Cocoon. Yes you need Saxon 8+ but it comes on Java and .Net now, so there’s no excuse now.
Good point about processor overhead with my for-each, its a old habit of mine.
To the earlier points, I was tempted to put in a part about the difference between Client-side and Server-side transformations. Client-side is useful when you have control over the feed or use javascript but ideally server-side makes more sense for most usage.