Re: [xsl] qualitative decline of xsl-list questions (was Re: Date)

Subject: Re: [xsl] qualitative decline of xsl-list questions (was Re: Date)
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 19:22:21 GMT

    Perhaps that's being a bit harsh, but the spate of questions of this sort is
    leading to increasingly hostile or belittling tones from Mssrs. Carlisle and
    Kay, among others (e.g., "Why on earth...?" with its implicit "you FOOL!").  

I wasn't going to enter this thread, but since the thread has
continued, and I was mentioned in the original posting...

It's always difficult in email to express finer points of emphasis
(especially when typing skills mean that any word longer than one letter
is likely to be mis typed..) 

I think the "why on earth" was probably from me, but it wasn't an
implict "you fool" but rather an implict "you _really_ don't want to
start from here"  Sometimes it seems better to persuade people that the
problem is misguided and that they really want to start with a different
source rather than being given some really funky xslt to solve the
problem as posed. Even if it just means piping the source through
sed -e "s/&amp;/&/g" before goving it to an XML parser.

I've been on the list from sometime near the beginning, like most of the
originals wandering over from dsssl-list, and I _hope_ I have helped 
this list's reputation for being generally more rather than less
helpful. While it is frustrating sometimes to see the 10001st question 
relating to nbsp, I would hate to think that this thread would put off
anyone asking beginner questions. Also while I've answered literally
thousands of questions on thsi list I can only recall asking a couple,
one of which was
... how do you produce an entity reference in the output.... 

David

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