Re: [xsl] Measuring the complexity of XSLT stylesheets

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Jirka Kosek
| 
| I think that many people think about XML as about hierarchical way
| of describing/storing data. XSLT by default traverses XML data from
| the root to the leaves using templates. If you need to access other
| axes than child and descendant in your stylesheet, then there is
| usualy some complexity behind your data from human perspecitive of
| view. So counting number of XPath expressions that use different
| axes than child and descendant might give you some metric not
| completely unrelated to complexity of input data and their
| processing. Or you can assign different weight to differents axes to
| make it more "scientific".

I think this is a valid point, but probably not sufficient in itself.
(My three example stylesheets all come out with the rating zero here,
despite having very different complexity. That probably only goes to
show I should have more complex examples.) I'd think that you could
usefully augment the syntax tree node count with weighting of axes.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >