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

[Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>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