Re: [xsl] cleanup of <div>-elements

["Piez, Wendell A. (Fed) wendell.piez@xxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I concur with what Mike Kay says indeed I think it's super important (a
phrasing I would not have used in 2003).

It's also important to note that projects such as XSpec make it possible to
unit test XSLT this way, when without XPec or something like it, unit testing
is dauntingly complex for a solo dev or small shop.

The shape of the problem overall, as Mike notes, changes when the inputs scale
up and out (there are lots and lots, and/or they are uncontrolled or poorly
controlled). What happens upstream and how much of it there is will matter a
lot - XSLT is great for managing this complexity but only if you can see it.

Cheers, Wendell



From: Michael Kay michaelkay90@xxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2023 12:23 PM
To: xsl-list <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [xsl] cleanup of <div>-elements


In XSLT it is often easy to implement if it is easy to define.

Indeed, this applies to any language. But XSLT does have an advantage here,
which is that you can incrementally add rules as you discover more and more
oddities in the input. If you're dealing with a large number of input files
then the big problem becomes quality control: if you've got more documents
than you can "eyeball", you're going to need to do some automated checking
that you haven't introduced corruptions. It might be an idea to make this
exercise test-driven: start by defining the requirements in terms of
executable tests that the output must satisfy, and only then start writing the
code to actually do the transformations.

Michael Kay
Saxonica
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