Which one of these two styles should be preferred?
What are the advantages and shortcomings of each style
regarding readability, compactness, flexibility, efficiency
and maintainability?
Ideally, there should be an agreement (consensus) on the
answers to questions like these and one should be able to
find such answers easily in the archives and the FAQ.
I think it will take a while for this consensus to emerge.
My own rule of thumb was until recently "use XPath to find nodes and to
compute atomic values, use XSLT to create new nodes". But with the
introduction of xsl:sequence, I've started avoiding really long
(20-line) path expressions, and have taken to breaking them up either by
using xsl:for-each and xsl:choose or by calls on stylesheet functions.
Thank you Mike,
I understand this as personal preference or is this preference based on some
objective criteria?
I would appreciate your opinion on how do these two styles -- long (20-line
+) XPath expressions versus xslt-structured style -- score in readability,
compactness, flexibility, efficiency and maintainability.
I am sure that you have some observations and as the developer of Saxon 7
you're the best authority in shedding more light on this.
In the code examples I gave, if it were possible to implement the f:apply()
function in XQuery then I would be able to write the code entirely in
XQuery. This is not possible, because f:apply() must use
xsl:apply-templates.
In other words, why should we prefer the "XSLT style" to the "XQuery style"?
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Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list