Re: [xsl] Non-well-formed HTML in XSL

[Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx>]

Richard Mitchell wrote:
> Oh well perhaps now is not a good time to mention

The thing is, there are legions of developers out there who are in a hurry
or who are just lazy, and they don't want to learn how to do it right, they
want to just use whatever works, whatever gets the job done.

While telling them about d-o-e seems harmless, it undermines XSLT in the
long run, IMHO. The people who take those kind of shortcuts and never learn
about a node tree inevitably stumble around and get frustrated with XPath and 
XSLT as soon as they need to do something that seems more complicated, at 
least when the problem is defined in terms of Things XSLT Doesn't Really Do, 
like procedural code processing or markup-output-via-string-concatenation.

So don't tell them about d-o-e unless it's the only way out. It's far better
that they feel a need to learn about the processing model, because once they
understand it, they'll be much better able to solve future problems with XSLT. 
Those who cling to procedural habits in a functional language will eventually
get frustrated, either with the amount of work they have to do to get the 
output they want, or with the amount of overhead that all their extension 
functions incur :)

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________________
  mike j. brown                   |  xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
  denver/boulder, colorado, usa   |  resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/

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