RE: [xsl] Implementing a (fairly) complex business rule

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter,

At 11:12 AM 9/30/2008, you wrote:
> That's very clear.  Thanks.  And your diagnosis is spot on, of course.

You are welcome, of course.

> I remember you helping me out some years ago when I was "doing" xslt as
> part of an MSc course.  This is my first look at xslt since then, so you
> can imagine I've forgotten quite a lot.  It's coming back though -
> although you may have to put up with me plaguing the list for a while!
>
> (I got the MSc, BTW, with distinction)

It's good to see that education is serving a purpose, anyway. 
Remediating buggy machine-generated code on a deadline: that has to 
fall into the category of dirty jobs someone has to do. Fun.

FWIW, as I suggested, seeing constructs like 
"normalize-space(element)" vs "string-length(element/text()) > 0" 
is part of what tips off an expert as to whether code has been 
written by a skilled practitioner of XSLT/XPath, or by a Perl or 
Javascript or C programmer who has just jumped in. Or maybe by a 
program written by one of these estimable people. The best defense 
I've heard of expressions like the latter is that it's more explicit 
-- which may be true, if your audience is like you. The most honest 
is that it's done out of habit.

The XPath way is obscure if you don't know XPath. But I've never felt 
it was wrong to give those who don't know XPath, but who are trying 
to program XSLT, a little XPath exercise. :-)

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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