RE: [xsl] XSLT use cases; data-centric todocument-centrictransformations

["Andrew Welch" <ajwelch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Having a single template is not weird, in fact while XSLT was
> being designed it was thought to be such a common and
> important use case that a special "easy" syntax was designed
> for that case. The "literal result element as stylesheet" (or
> in xslt2 terminoligy "simplified stylesheet") If your
> stylesheet just consists of a single template matching "/"
> you can drop the outer xsl:tstylesheet and xsl:template
> element markup.

<rant>

IMHO, 'simplified stylesheets' are anything but simple and force the use
of for-each over apply-templates - a bad thing when you are learning the
language for the first time.  Whatever the good intentions of the
language designers were, simplified stylesheets provide no real
benefits: they don't scale, they aren't any easier to learn and they
ingrain bad habits.  For people to really grasp XSLT the push style of
processing really needs promoting first - maybe the identity transform
should be the only stylesheet that is allowed to called a 'simplified
stylesheet'?

</rant>

cheers
andrew