Re: [xsl] Q: to Jeni Tennison regarding your APress titles...

Subject: Re: [xsl] Q: to Jeni Tennison regarding your APress titles...
From: "M. David Peterson" <m.david@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 13:19:52 -0800
Hey Jeni,

Sorry for the late reply! Was out yesterday for the holiday event here on the other side of the pond. :)

Jeni Tennison wrote:

Hi David,

You mean "foo[number(@bar)]" (which selects the <foo> element children
of the current node whose bar attributes match their position amongst
other <foo> elements within the current node) or, more feasibly,
"foo[number(current()/@bar)]" (which selects the nth <foo> element
child of the current node where n is the value of the bar attribute of
the current node).


Hmmm... I'm not sure I understand. The way I interpreted what David Carlisle had stated was that, for example, if @bar had the value of "5" that you could use then use the number function to tell the XSLT processor to use the literal number value of @bar to determine the position of an element in relation to the document order of an element in relation to its siblings. Is that how it is or did I misinterpret what David was saying?


Right -- that's part of why I tend to advise people to use matching
templates with modes rather than named templates: with a matching
template, you have some hope of knowing what the context node is by
looking at the pattern, with a named template you can't tell without
finding the call to that template, which makes debugging that much
harder.


Ah yes, very good advice. In fact I have found that the only time I even use named templates anymore is for recursively seeking out particular content within a string and processing it further or as a way to specify the number of times the named template should be called and the instruction set processed before moving forward. And even then I try to make minimal use of this type of processing for the simple fact that if used in the wrong situation you can find yourself spending a lot of CPU cycles and bottleneck an entire application because of it.


I'll certainly try to pop in.


That would be great! I know that we would all appreciate any further insight you have on particular topics. We are going to use Dr. Kay's XSLT and XPath (1.0 and 2.0) Programmer References as a way of further referencing a topic. But to have your insight to further understand a topic of interest would be invaluable and an outstanding asset to the project.


No; a link to Amazon is fine.


Great, I will leave it as is then.

Thanks again Jeni! I've added a couple of entries on the site today, one which is specific to copyrights and the policy I will be implementing when it comes to anything that could be construed as a copyright infringement. If you have a chance to take a look at the policy and have anything additional you would like for me to consider, please let me know. The last thing I want to have happen is to infringe upon copyrights and will be making a specific effort to not use the literal text from the book beyond simple quotes and, of course, all of these will be properly marked and attributed. I will be asking for those who make comments to follow these same guidelines and I will be monitoring conformance, deleting anything that could even possibly be considered an infringement. If at anytime you see anything on the site that I have missed that you or APress feel a bit uneasy about please let me know and I will make sure it is taken off the site immediatelly!

Cheers!

<M:D/>

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

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