Re: [xsl] best practices for managing xsl library

[James Fuller <jim.fuller@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Johnson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Apart from the EXLT submissions page (http://www.exslt.org/
> submissions/) and the XSLT Standard Library (http://
> xsltsl.sourceforge.net/#id1954663), are there any good resources / 
> examples of best practices for managing a large library of xsl 
> templates?

I think all the XSLT STD Lib suggestions are fine to adopt.

btw which version of XSLT > XSLT 1.0 or 2.0 ?

Do you intend the library to be consumed or contributed too by public
users, if so striking the balance between the ease of 'submission'
versus completeness (re doc, tests, etc) can be quite tricky.

Handling versioning is another issue, would suggest to export versions
from source control with unique version number, rather then try to embed
and track changes by embedding revision type elements.

Do you intend to auto generate documentation from the library? If so you
may find embedding doc type elements directly inside xslt to be more
useful then have a seperate meta data document.

Who are your main users? for example with EXSLT we identified XSLT
processors implementators as a main user so they could use the doc.

I personally advise adopting concrete conventions only when they are
clearly enforceable (perhaps via a schema, schematron, etc), note that
most matters of style can usually be fixed at the submission/integration
process

Also I would first setup various testing harnesses so you are able to
automate test running (be it xslt style unit tests, or simple transforms
with input and expected output); it is important to be able to run tests
against all major processors, I use Ant for this....you may find that
this influences how you design your distro.

gl, Jim Fuller

note: DocBook has a considerable number of XSLT stylesheets as well and
lots of good advice embedded in it.