Re: [xsl] Should You Comment XSLT And If So, How?

Subject: Re: [xsl] Should You Comment XSLT And If So, How?
From: Ted Stresen-Reuter <tedmasterweb@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 23:00:26 -0600
Very interesting... thanks for the detailed response! This is pretty much what I was sensing would be the case...

On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, at 10:25 PM, Ryan Gallagher wrote:

I am just getting settled with XSLT myself but the few books i've read on the
subject, and my fondness of source generated documentation... leads me to the
approach that follows:


Use XML TAGS in your xsl...

<doc type="variable">
  <desc>This variable is for X</desc>
</doc>
<xsl:variable name="foobar" select="Hello World!"/>

<doc type="template">
  <desc type="short">This template does foo.</desc>
  <desc type="long">I'm the verbose desc...</desc>
</doc>
<xsl:template match="foo">
...
</xsl:template>

This looks a lot like XML schema to me. Could we call it a schema for XSLT documentation?

Granted normal comments will still have their place. But anything that you
would specifically like to be able to parse out into "pretty documentation" to
go alongside your API docs or whatever, could be created from these tags using
XSLT itself to do the parsing. Gotta love internal solutions!

Yeah, I'm nearly speechless. This is truly a novel approach for removing code documentation from the code itself. Invisibility by assimilation ;-)

If you like you can even give your comments a namespace and DTD, but from what
i've read/understand anything not in the xsl namespace will be safely ignored
outside of templates. Inside templates i'm not positive, but namespaces would
certainly resolve the conflicts.

Ok, so the big question is, do we know of an XSLT style sheet a la javadoc for processing XSLT documents that have been prepared with this documentation? That would be, well, wonderful!

Aside:


I use normal <!-- --> comments to cause my editor (vim) to fold up blocks of
code by default. With foldmethod set to marker you can do the following.


<!-- Template: foo {{{ -->
<xsl: template name="foo" match="example">
...
</xsl:template
<!-- }}} -->

Would result in a collapsed object:

# Template: foo -->-----------------------------------------------------#

Wish my text editor did that...

This is all probably overkill for small projects (cept maybe the folding) but if
you undertake a large xslt project, source generated documentation is very handy.

And in this case, invisible. It integrates with the code, which is a good thing. Thanks again for the feedback.


Ted

-- Ryan Gallagher (binerman) binerman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The Parchive Project http://parchive.sourceforge.net http://sourceforge.net/projects/parchive


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