Re: Are long XPath statements inherently bad?

Sorry again, I am relatively new to XSL. I am trying to put together of events as a table by outputting a list of items in each cell by executing queries such as the following (this is actually simplified):

select="$newshome/item[@key='recurring']/item[@template='event'][( @yearspecific, . ) != 1 and substring( @date, 5, 4 ) = $moday ) or ( @yearspecific = 1 and substring( @date, 1, 8 ) = $date )] | $newshome/item[@key='recurring']/item[@key=$year]/item[@template='event'][( @yearspecific != 1 and substring( @date, 5, 4 ) = $moday ) or ( @yearspecific = 1 and substring( @date, 1, 8 ) = $date )]

Is it just my syntax/logic that's bad or is there some better way I could/should do this? The requirements for including events for a date are actually pretty complex - this is just one of a series of queries (which I would be happy to share!) to get events for a date. Are long XPath statements always bad, other than just the possible readability issue?

The calendar does have performance issues and I will probably rewrite it in .NET. Would you expect XSL extensions to be helpful here, or just use pure .NET (maybe an ASCX) or something I'm not thinking of?

I probably need to convert this to CSS positioning and I'm not sure if that would help with the problem or make it harder.

Thanks in advance,

-John