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Re: Re: _why_ do people use xsl:element and xsl:attribute so much
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- Subject: Re: [xsl] Re: _why_ do people use xsl:element and xsl:attribute so much
- From: Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>
- Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2001 19:09:43 -0400
- References: <200109051910.f85JAJQ60739@skew.org><200109051910.f85JAJQ60739@skew.org>
- Reply-To: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
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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Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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