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Re: Re: _why_ do people use xsl:element and xsl:attribute so much


At 06:30 PM 9/5/01, David wrote:
>But I think that it _is_ natural to say that a template body can be
>viewed as a fragment of the output tree, and that the most natural way
>to express a tree structure in XML is to use the standard XML
>representation of that tree, thus
><a href="...">...</a>
>for an a element with an href attribute. (where actually one uses
>xslt/xpath rather than ... to fill out the blanks.

This is fair enough, as long as one has made the leap from looking "at" the 
markup  to looking "through" the markup, seeing the tree model behind it. 
Sometimes I tell students that that's when they know they're really 
starting to think in XSLT, when they no longer see text and tags, but 
rather a nested element structure that just happens to have tags as 
delimiters. But how can a new user most quickly get to and make that leap?

>On the other hand the comments from a tool author on the utility of the
>more regular xsl:element constructs sounded reasonable, tool generated
>sheets, and setting breakpoints etc does seem to have different
>requirements/flavour than hand authoring.

Absolutely, and I'm glad he chimed in, since the reasonableness given that 
set of requirements really justified the practice (whereas otherwise it 
seemed at best, an implementation shortcut, at worst bizarre and lazy).

It's interesting how differently the language looks (at least 
syntactically) when approached this way. SVG also shows a sizable gap 
between hand-authored, hand-tuned documents, and documents generated by a 
GUI. I guess whether it's better to start learning "the hard way" (using 
emacs or -- gasp! -- vi) or "the easy way" (choose your 
mapper/template-generator), will always be a pedagogical issue, and may not 
have a Right Answer.

In any case, I think we're agreed that an XSLT developer does need to learn 
to see through the markup-based syntax, into the actual workings of the 
language, if she or he is to gain any real facility. Do xsl:element and 
xsl:attribute help with that? I suppose they might -- but again, depending 
on the learner.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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