[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: hard core xlt ;-)
Here are some comments what I consider to be two of the harder/hardest things to do in XSLT: 1. "Generic" XSLT. Usually you write a stylesheet with assumptions about the structure of the input XML. Generic XSLT makes no such assumptions. It processes the source in terms of node types. An element contains other elements, attributes, text, comments, etc. Start at the root node and drill down, using recursion (e.g. element template calls apply-templates on its subelements). A few months after starting to learn XSLT, I created two stylesheets using this approach. One of them takes any XML and creates a colour-coded and indented HTML "pretty print" of the XML. You could use it to present itself. The other stylesheet took created a specimen of XML and generated a first-cut DTD. I had to ask a lot of questions on this list, but I learned an enormous amount about XSLT. 2. XSLT that generates XSLT. The issue here is that you have two namespaces for the XSLT, one for the actual instructions in the stylesheet, and one for the XSLT you will be generating. It is not always difficult, depending on how much variation there is in the output stylesheet. The tricky thing is that you are effectively writing two transformations at the same time, each applying to different source XML, and you have to think about e.g. which transformation should make a given decision. Both of these are great lessons in XSLT. There are others - simulating "looping" using recursion - the misc. sorting issues and the Muenchian method (will be obsolete in XSLT 2.0?) and I'm sure people can add to that list. Possibly the final step would be to implement XSLT yourself, but you don't have to build cars to be a good driver. XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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