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.
Michael Kay
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list