[xsl] Re: On XSLT 2.0 Writing Styles

["Dimitre Novatchev" <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

> > Which one of these two styles should be preferred?
> >
> > What are the advantages and shortcomings of each style
> > regarding readability, compactness, flexibility, efficiency
> > and maintainability?
> >
> > Ideally, there should be an agreement (consensus) on the
> > answers to questions like these and one should be able to
> > find such answers easily in the archives and the FAQ.
> >
>
> I think it will take a while for this consensus to emerge.
>
> My own rule of thumb was until recently "use XPath to find nodes and to
> compute atomic values, use XSLT to create new nodes". But with the
> introduction of xsl:sequence, I've started avoiding really long
> (20-line) path expressions, and have taken to breaking them up either by
> using xsl:for-each and xsl:choose or by calls on stylesheet functions.

Thank you Mike,

I understand this as personal preference or is this preference based on some
objective criteria?

I would appreciate your opinion on how do these two styles -- long (20-line
+) XPath expressions versus xslt-structured style --  score in readability,
compactness, flexibility, efficiency and maintainability.

I am sure that you have some observations and as the developer of Saxon 7
you're the best authority in shedding more light on this.

In the code examples I gave, if it were possible to implement the f:apply()
function in XQuery then I would be able to write the code entirely in
XQuery. This is not possible, because f:apply() must use
xsl:apply-templates.

In other words, why should we prefer the "XSLT style" to the "XQuery style"?


=====
Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL





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