Re: [xsl] use cases for d-o-e

Subject: Re: [xsl] use cases for d-o-e
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 14:58:21 GMT
> NAG members are not allowed to invoke case three to thwart the proposal!
>  :-) :-)

Sniff.

Actually my other constituents (MathML users) might be more
disadvantaged.

Quick quiz, what do each of these MathML expressions represent:

1)  <mo>&Integral;</mo>
2)  <mo>&#8706;</mo>

However I agree with you that almost all uses of d-o-e are either
abuses of the system or indications of missing functionality that ought
to be added. It's hard to think of any good use of the feature.
But partly for that reason I suspect it's too late to get rid of it.
the world being what it is, there are more abusers than people of good
taste, (not on this list of course, where the oposite is true).

I suspect there would be howls of pain from users if the feature went,
with possibly fatal effects on xslt2 deployment.

You also missed out the other main use of d-o-e: outputting start and end
tags in different templates thus avoiding teh entire tree processing
paradigm of XSLT (This is rather common amongst beginners, I expect).

In the case of outputting nearly-but-not-quite-XML formats such as *SP
(and now, regretably, XQuery) it might be possible to consider a variant
of the text output method that serialised element nodes as XML markup
rather than discarded them and processed content. That would mean
switching from xml output method with d-o-e to the text output method
would not involve explictly calling templates to serialize the node
structure.

David

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