[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSLT 1.1 comments
> Clark C. Evans wrote: > > Many people want scripts beacuse the "modulization" abilities > > of XSLT leave alot to be desired, i.e., making a template and > > calling a template are just too verbose. > > That's not the primary reason I could imagine wanting user-defined > functions. I can imagine two situations that this would not help: > > 1. for getting information about the system in ways impossible in > XSLT, like getting the current date, testing whether a file or > directory exists, or pulling information out of a database from within > a stylesheet This is prime territory for separately standardized extensions, say using POSIX. > 2. for accessing templates within XPath predicates - for example if I > write a funky regexp match template then I'd like to be able to use it > to select all nodes whose value matches a particular regexp Prime territory for improving run-time dynamicism within XSLT itself. I think introspection has proven itself as a powerful means of improving programmer expressivity, and better introspective and dynamic programming support in XSLT would eliminate, IMO, most of the need for extensions beyond standard libraries. > There are ways around both these current limitations - you can pass > the current date and so on in as a parameter, and you can (in XSLT > 1.1) construct an RTF holding copies of or references to the relevant > nodes to get the second functionality - but they're very unweildy. I agree that they are currently unweildy, but I think that this will be minimized by standardization layered on top of XSLT 1.0. -- Uche Ogbuji Principal Consultant uche.ogbuji@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx +1 303 583 9900 x 101 Fourthought, Inc. http://Fourthought.com 4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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