RE: [xsl] XPath for matching multiple child elements

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:20 AM 9/29/2006, Mike wrote:
> In 90% of applications better maintainability is worth having at the cost of
> a bit of performance. For example, a pipeline architecture that modularizes
> the transformation is almost always a good idea if it it takes a bit longer.
> (concerning which, see http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/docs/langspec.html if you
> haven't already done so. This is an important development for the XSLT
> community).

Yes, we heard Norm Walsh report on this at Extreme last August in 
Montreal! (Though now we've gone off topic.)

Back on topic -- pipeline architectures seem to me to present an 
interesting problem for maintainability. When they solve problems 
that require very baroque approaches to be done in one pass, they 
would seem on balance to be more maintainable (inasmuch as the 
definition of "baroque" in this context might be "hard to maintain"). 
On the other hand, I'm not sure pipelining in itself is any more (or 
less) "natural" than template matching; experience suggests it 
demands a similar kind of "aha" moment before its strengths become 
apparent (even if many programmers had that moment so long ago they 
take it for granted). Likewise, it appears to require a similar 
willingness to think of a stylesheet holistically, trusting parts of 
the system you don't see right in front of you. So, yes, more 
maintainable, to those in the know.

> But in this example, I'm not convinced any of the suggestions have delivered
> better maintainability.

Agreed.

Cheers,
Wendell