RE: how to understand a complex stylesheet

Hi Michael,

If you have Visual Studio then you could try the Visual XSLT plug-in:
http://www.activestate.com/Products/Visual_XSLT/
I haven't worked with it, so I can't tell if you can load and visualize
existing stylesheets, but you can create them.

Cheers,
<prs/> 

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Norman [mailto:michael.norman@xxxxxxx] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2004 11:27 AM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  how to understand a complex stylesheet

Hello Georg.

Thanks for you reply.

George James wrote:
> Henning
> The discussion at that site mentions PXSL which is a non-XML way of 
> expressing XSL templates.
> 
> I find this idea very attractive and helps to visually differentiate 
> the XSLT components from the XML literal result elements.
> 
> I'm aware of PXSL, NiceXSL and XSLSscript.  All are trying to do 
> similar things, but to me each one has its own strengths and 
> weaknesses.  There is also XQuery which uses non-XML syntax to process 
> XML data (although this is really a different animal).

PXSL and related languages are indeed interesting approaches to "clean" up
the source code of XSLT stylesheets. But the problem remains: you take one
look at it, and you still don't understand that much. You still have to roam
through the source code to get answers to: which template calls which
template; are templates located in other files; etc. 
This are questions which aren't answered immediately. 
Although I am aware that probably no visualization or any other method can
make a complex stylesheets understandable at once, just making the code more
readable won't solve the problem. BUT it is one step to it, that is true
indeed!

> Some kind of visual modeling/design tool that generated XSL would be a 
> very interesting idea.

Right now I am more looking for tools to visualize existing stylesheets, not
tools to create stylesheets. But having one approach will most certainly
lead to the other, so if there are applications to visually create XSL,
please let me, too!

Thanks for your help,

bye

Henning