Re: XSL : how to turn <name> into <data elem="name">

On Thursday, February 08, 2001 11:57 PM
Peter Flynn wrote:

> At Thursday, 8 February 2001, Dave Pawson wrote:
>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Michael Kay [mailto:mhkay@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> >
> >> But I am slowly coming to the conclusion that XSLT has a
particular
> >> attraction to those who enjoy typing for its own sake.
> >
> >Wasnt' that one of the design goals of xml, from Tim Bray,
> >It must be readable, even if its verbose ;-)
>
> Certainly was: "terseness is of minimal importance". We had
> some fun with that but I think the expectations were that
>
>[ ... overview of the "terseness" issue in xml spec and practice]
>
> So I guess verbosity really doesn't matter. Unless you're
> a manager looking at improving the productivity of your
> development or editorial team.

Yes, but this thread wasn't originally about terseness in element
naming etc.

I wanted just to raise a small ? against Mike's comment on verbosity
of XSLT code . It's natural for people with his fluency and
understanding to see more elegant and/or efficient ways of expressing
things than most of us can manage. And it's instructive to be shown
how to condense our code (especially when the terser version expresses
the essential logic better). But I hope that doesn't deter people from
showing code that may be less than optimally terse. At school, there
were no marks for just putting down the right answer: you had to "show
your working".  Am I the only one here who actually learns from seeing
people's possibly verbose "working" as much as I do from the condensed
improved versions that are subsequently offered? And in fact,
sometimes I wouldn't appreciate the final version if I hadn't seen its
intentions unpacked first in a more expansive way.

Michael
------------------------------------------
Michael Beddow
http://www.mbeddow.net/


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