Cart
|
[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Omnimark vs. XSL (Saxon) Challenge
 I use this set of nodes just for the sake of looping a certain number of times. In Jeni Tennison's book "XSLT and XPath On The Edge" it is called "The Piez Method". You are right, I don't need two variables (just an old habit...). Will I ever live it down? But yes ... and Mike knows the provenance of the technique. :-> Jeni called it that because she was tickled (she said) by how counter-intuitively obvious it was as a way of avoiding more cumbersome methods, and wanted to give me credit for its small measure of tricky (if not diabolical) inventiveness (my words not hers: her word might have been "sweet"). But everyone who uses it (including me, when I do) should really be ashamed of themselves. At best, it's a shortcut and should be avoided except in very constrained circumstances. Such as: you don't need to iterate many times in any case, and a node set guaranteed to be large enough is readily available. One rule of thumb: if you need to go parse something to get enough nodes, it's not worth it. Another: don't ever look at set X and suppose that you need to iterate count(X) times -- just iterate over the set X that you would have counted. That is, it's silly to do this: <xsl:for-each select="$bignodeset[position() <= count($nodeset)"> ... </xsl:for-each> when you could simply do <xsl:for-each select="$nodeset"> ... </xsl:for-each> Believe it or not, I've seen it done the hard way. All in all, I can think of other ways I'd rather go down in history. If only I'd first figured out positional grouping using keys! 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 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
