Re: [xsl] best boolean practice

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2013-07-31 03:54 +1000, Terence Kearns wrote:
> Just a quickie. I'm writing some code to produce XML which will later
> be transformed and selected on, and I am wondering what will be the
> best way to represent boolean values as far as XSL designers are
> concerned?
>
> value="yes"
> value="true"
> value="1"
>
> does it even make a difference at all?

If you are using schema validation, then in the lexical space "1" and 
"true" represent true(), and "0" and "false" represent false() ... 
nothing else.

If you are not using schema validation, consider your audience and 
consider the concept.

Then consider how the concept is presented to the audience:

  masked="true"

or:

  is-masked="yes"

but there is nothing really wrong with:

  masked="yes"

> I'm thinking attributes will definitely be more intuitive than
> elements. Am I right?
> So this is not quite as good <value>yes</value> (certainly uses up
> more characters).

Depends really on how you've represented other concepts in your 
document model.  Being consistent to your users is, to me, the 
governing factor since you can put a string value in either an 
attribute or an element.  Do you use attributes for other 
unstructured string values?

There really isn't a right or wrong way ... consider how your choice 
will be accepted by your XML users and put the burden on your 
stylesheet writers to accommodate that.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . Ken

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