RE: xslt 2.0 challenge

> After all that has been said about xpath 2.0, I'm not sure 
> which is more
> readable...

Using <http://nicexsl.sourceforge.net> resolves the quotes and brackets
levels of readability:
(After automated XSLT to NiceXSL translation, I had to manually prettify the
XPaths,
since whitespace is preserved in converted XPaths.)

stylesheet version="2.0" {
    match(/) {
        variable spanspec := /table/tgroup/spanspec;
        <!-- constucts a sequence of the two colspecs, note the 'as' -->
        variable first : element()+ {
            sequence (/table//colspec[(preceding-sibling::colspan[@colname =
$spanspec/@namest]
                                       and
following-sibling::colspan[@colname = $spanspec/@nameend])
                                       or @colname = $spanspec/@namest
                                       or @colname = $spanspec/@nameend]);
        }
        <!-- sums the columns specified by the start and end column
         by the total number of columns, and then
         formats it to two decimal places
         and concats on a percentage symbol -->
        value-of (concat(string(format-number(
           (sum(for $x in $first/@colwidth return
number(translate($x,'m','')))
            div sum(for $x in $first/../colspec/@colwidth return
number(translate($x,'m','')))) * 100,
           '00.00')),'%'));
    }
} 

A more plausible implementation should factor the XPaths using intermediate
vatriables
or stylesheet functions, so that each XPath line is naturally one reasonable
length line.
This will raise the line count slightly but give some nice names to the
intermediates.

	Regards
			
		Ed Willink

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