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

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:28 AM 9/30/2008, Mike wrote:
> A special case is what one might call "abnormal mixed content", where the
> structure is that of mixed content but the semantics are unorthodox: for
> example
>
>  <date>2008-09-30
>   <source>estimated</source>
>   <calendar>Gregorian</calendar>
>  </date>
>
> (It would be more usual to use attributes here rather than child elements;
> but one also sees comments used.) In such a case you may need to find the
> text node (or all the text nodes) explicitly using path expressions.

This is also a good example of what you have to do when dealing with 
data whose design is, shall we say, "suboptimal".

XSLT, especially XSLT 1.0, is at its best when the incoming data is 
well designed. When it isn't, one has to call on more advanced 
techniques such as processing text nodes explicitly. Of course, XSLT 
also exerts a gravitational pull on XML semantics, such that 
well-designed XML comes to be the XML that XSLT can handle without fuss.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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