Subject: Re: [xsl] Re: How to output open/close tags independently? From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 09:55:48 -0500 |
At 2002-12-30 15:44 -0700, Edward L. Knoll wrote:Not that I'm picking on you specifically Wendell, but your reply was the most blatantly representative of a class of responses of a particularly XSL purist/snobbish nature which I find extremely objectionable. There was a reply from a Mitch Amiano which actually supplied a suggested approach which "appeared" entirely reasonable, so tried it out. ...
(2) The reason d-o-e is "not recommended" has to do with something much more subtle than whether it "works" or not. The problem with it is that it's a feature that is (a) not mandated for compliance (i.e. not all processors have it, so it's not portable), and (b) dependent on a processing stage (serialization directly after the transform) which may or may not happen. This means that it sometimes works (and works well, if you're careful), and sometimes doesn't work at all. (This has all been said on the list before.)
My recommendation has been *if* you understand the dependency introduced by d-o-e, and *if* you are sure that's fine for your case, then go ahead and use it. But if you don't understand it, or if you can't be quite certain the dependency will never be a problem -- stay away from it.
Unfortunately, we also have a higher-level problem in that this advice has to be given repeatedly on this list, and in all those repetitions I and some others may come off as "purist" and even "snobbish", taking such trouble to warn new users about something so arcane (and evidently so useful). Yet it is scary to think of the alternative -- how the list would howl if we recommended d-o-e, and then had to deal with a permathread of "you recommended d-o-e and now my stylesheet won't work in X!".
(You can take a peek at http://www.mulberrytech.com to decide whether you think we do real work.)
-- Upcoming hands-on in-depth XSLT/XPath and/or XSL-FO: - North America: Feb 3 - Feb 7,2003
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