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At 06:38 PM 9/5/01, Mike wrote:
So I guess I am a bit conflicted as to the best way to steer people when introducing them to XSLT. Is it better to start with a clean slate and explain it all from the ground up, or do you make some assumptions about what they already know and put effort into leading them from "the way you'd think it would be done" to "the way it really gets done"? Again, I don't want to speak for Debbie, but I think we lean towards the "clean slate" approach. This is partly because we actually get students who don't have a procedural or even a web background, on whom those particular assumptions are lost. Interestingly, these students often turn out to have a remarkable facility with the language. (It'll be interesting if XSL-FO brings in a whole new class of users from the off line publication world.) Experience does show that however you get there, a firm grasp of (a) template-based processing and (b) the ins-and-outs of XPath, together provide a good foundation for almost any use case. The most frustration I've seen from self-taught users has been either because they didn't understand templates (including those helpful but sometimes pesky built-in templates), or because they were trying to use XPath without really knowing how it works. Cheers, Wendell ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ====================================================================== XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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