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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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