RE: [xsl] xslt critique

["Greg Fichter" <gfichter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wow the article writer likes to use his vocabulary!

I must agree slightly with this article.  I am new to XSL and I was placed
in charge of fixing an application that was written by a programmer that
just quit.  Trying to backtrack problems in XSLT and debugging was extrely
difficult.  The web pages were very long some have hundreds of lines of code
and it is confusing when data is being transformed in two seperate web pages
(the front ASP page and the behind the scenes XSLT stylesheet).

Does anyone have good debugging techniques or tips for XSLT?

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of bryan
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 2:25 AM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [xsl] xslt critique



http://www.cs.uu.nl/~visser/ftp/LVV02.pdf
has an article about strategic programming, included in it is a critique
about XSLT, I was interested in what people on the list might feel about
these criticisms?
I'm finding some of the complaints not sensible although this is
probably because I have trouble at times with too much abstraction.

Quote from article:
"At least two ingredients of strategic programming are truly missing.
There
is no notion of partiality. Templates simply apply or not. Any kind of
backtracking model is not available. More seriously, XSLT templates
are not first-class. As discussed for basic rewriting and tangled
traversal
in functional programming, this leads to tangling traversal control
and computation. In fact, XSLT even lacks appropriate type-specific
operations since one cannot even easily pattern match on elements of
a certain structure. This was observed in [28]. The resulting
inappropriateness of XSLT for intentionally generic document
transformation is discussed and illustrated in [41]. Besides, an
XSLT-like language design
is hardly accessible for typeful (generic) transformations, although
there
are some theoretical results on typing essential fragments of the XSLT
expressiveness..."


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