Re: [xsl] Haskell programmer's rant about xslt

Subject: Re: [xsl] Haskell programmer's rant about xslt
From: Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:19:55 +0100
>His point is that XSLT makes it especially difficult to debug (bad) programs written by others. How would one best solve the problem he describes?

Yes, debugging stylesheets that have evolved over a period of time and contain lots of overlays can be difficult. The price of making it easy for stylesheets to evolve is that they can evolve badly.

I generally use the Saxon -T option to resolve such issues. The output can be horribly large when the input file is large, unfortunately, but it usually reveals fairly quickly which rules are being invoked for which nodes. Perhaps a variant that only outputs the template rule matches would be useful (it's a very simple tweak).

Michael Kay
Saxonica

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