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Re: Template removes non-duplicate elements

Subject: Re: Template removes non-duplicate elements
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:59:47 -0400
Re:  Template removes non-duplicate elements
Mark,

At 10:11 AM 3/14/2009, you wrote:
I am working with the 4th ed. of your book, but find at the age of 70, learning XPath a difficult task. While I can read your solution quite easily, I could never have composed it.

XPath is fairly easy to fake up to a point, but it is deeper than it looks, and learning it is not the work of a weekend. (XPath 1.0 can actually be covered in a few hours, but it takes practice to master. And XPath 2.0 is a different critter entirely: if you've mastered XPath 1.0 it's not too hard -- but if you haven't, not.)


If you work with XSLT a lot, it's worth the effort to learn XPath systematically and/or with the help of an expert. (This list is good for the expert part.)

If you don't, you can expect hard problems to continue to be hard. Of course, frequently (and maybe always) there's also a pathway that allows you to move complexity from XPath into XSLT. For example, your current problem could be dealt with by pipelining intermediate results to another process to normalize the entries before grouping, thereby dealing with the Xref/Heading wrinkle.

Of course, that means more complexity and therefore more imagination on the XSLT side. But if the problem is complex the solution will have to deal with that somehow.

Cheers,
Wendell


====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================

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