RE: [xsl] Newbie wants comments too . . .

[Tony Nassar <tnassar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

+1 for Wendell's comments. I'm an experienced developer in numerous languages,
but XSLT killed me at first. Spend the money on Jeni Tennison's book, or the
XSLT Cookbook. The first especially is a great compendium of basic techniques
that you simply have to know. They're part of the folklore, and you won't
learn them by reading the XSLT spec. Trust me: even if your boss won't
reimburse you, you will save yourselves lots of pain (and time...and time is
money).

-----Original Message-----
From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
...

Frank,

At 05:44 PM 5/7/2008, you wrote:
>>ps -- any particular reason why you have xsl:preserve-space="*"?
>
>lol - You give me more credit than I deserve.

Oh no I don't: I merely asked! :-)

>When I didn't like the look of the output file, I scanned the
>command table in my XSLT book and this command looked likely to help.
>
>It didn't help (or hurt) what I was doing, so I left it in and never
>looked back.
>
>I took it out in the update you provided . . . as you indicated
>"indent" was much better than trying to use xsl:text commands to put
>in line feeds where I wanted them.

XSLT is so different from other sorts of things that most developers
have tried that it can be difficult to learn on your own, especially
without good simple examples and models to follow. Things are worse
when you are thrown into the deep end in problem-solving mode, with a
deadline.