RE: [xsl] Apply-templates - how to omit top level element tags?

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike

As others have suggested, the canonical approach to handling a given 
element in different ways is to qualify your templates with modes.

This isn't the only approach, but it's probably the best path to explore.

At 07:07 PM 9/7/2005, you wrote:
> Jay Bryant>> Do you dislike the apply and match scheme (XSLT's native
> idiom)
>
> Good question. Honestly I don't think I currently think that way so I
> don't know (such as an English speaker has to translate from German to
> be able to understand, whereas a fluent German speaker "thinks" in
> German.)  It seems fraught with side-effects, however, and it seems hard
> to verify that output is "correct" when using that idiom.

It's certainly true that those who are experienced in other kinds of 
programming frequently find they have to re-wire their brains to get the 
most out of XSLT. (Some have been fortunate to work with other functional 
languages and have already done the rewiring; others were never wired 
"wrong" to begin with.)

As for the strengths and weaknesses of the paradigm: not only is processing 
with templates not fraught with side-effects -- actually side-effects (in 
the strict technical sense of having the state of the processor being 
altered by the processing as it goes) is precisely what the XSLT paradigm 
is designed to *avoid*. So, no side effects. While it is possible to get 
around this in XSLT, it's not easy. Yet even this can take getting used to: 
like walking on a floor after you're used to walking on tightropes.

You have a much stronger point in asking about the verifiability of the 
correctness of your output. Depending on how "correctness" is defined in 
given cases, however, it turns out that in practice most stylesheets turn 
out to be fairly transparent -- so even when they're difficult to verify 
formally, they turn out to be very dependable if constructed properly.

Also, there are often brute-force methods of verification available, such 
as validating the output against the schema of your choice (shocking!).

Likewise, this is an area that will be significantly improved by the 
schema-aware version of XSLT 2.0 (for those content to use W3C XML Schema).

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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