[xsl] Re: xsl-list Digest 28 May 2008 05:10:01 -0000 Issue 1511

["Ronnie Royston" <rhroyston@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Carlisle, thank you for putting me on the right track!  Wow, I
was way off in the weeds.

XSL is overwhelming and although I sometimes feel like it is beyond my
reach, I'm not going to give up.  All I know is that reading about
this stuff is disorienting and humiliating - you gotta get to the
keyboard and try.  XSL will be learned by doing, not by reading IMHO.
I wish someone would publish a series of exercises that I could
perform, ones that build on one another.  Maybe I will re-visit Jeni
Tennison's book again.

So, your beautifully crafted instruction:

> <xsl:value-of
>    select="for $s in $skus return key('sku',$s[document('mySkus.xml')/skus/sku[starts-with(.,$s)]],$root)/name"
>    separator=", "/>

leads me to read more on sequence expressions.  I've got to go figure
out why the <xsl:for-each> was not the correct way, how the locally
defined <$s> variable works, and how the brackets <[]> work.

Interesting that IE and Firefox fail to transform using the stylesheet
where Saxon does it just fine.  I guess they don't have built-in
version 2 XSLT and/or XPATH features?...  I'll have to figure out how
to call a Saxon transformation from VBA when the time comes.

Anyways, thanks, and boy is the World Wide Web (this mailing list) cool!

- Ronnie