Re: [xsl] XSLT use cases; data-centric todocument-centrictransformations

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

  IMHO, 'simplified stylesheets' are anything but simple and force the use
  of for-each over apply-templates - a bad thing when you are learning the
  language for the first time.  Whatever the good intentions of the
  language designers were, simplified stylesheets provide no real
  benefits: they don't scale, they aren't any easier to learn and they
  ingrain bad habits.  For people to really grasp XSLT the push style of
  processing really needs promoting first - maybe the identity transform
  should be the only stylesheet that is allowed to called a 'simplified
  stylesheet'?

Actually I don't think simplified stylesheets were intended to be simple
for beginners. As you point out they are pretty much useless when
writing stylesheets by hand. I believe that they are there for exactly
the reason mentioned at the start of this thread: graphical front ends
to templating languages at the time expected that the "template"
looked more or less like the final result document into which a few
(asp/jsp/whatever) instructions are inserted to dynamically fill in some
data. l-r-e-a-s provides a model of XSLT usage that more closely fits
that model and was (I think, I wasn't there) designed to encourage takup
of XSLT in that area.

David


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