IMHO, 'simplified stylesheets' are anything but simple and force the use
of for-each over apply-templates - a bad thing when you are learning the
language for the first time. Whatever the good intentions of the
language designers were, simplified stylesheets provide no real
benefits: they don't scale, they aren't any easier to learn and they
ingrain bad habits. For people to really grasp XSLT the push style of
processing really needs promoting first - maybe the identity transform
should be the only stylesheet that is allowed to called a 'simplified
stylesheet'?
Actually I don't think simplified stylesheets were intended to be simple
for beginners. As you point out they are pretty much useless when
writing stylesheets by hand. I believe that they are there for exactly
the reason mentioned at the start of this thread: graphical front ends
to templating languages at the time expected that the "template"
looked more or less like the final result document into which a few
(asp/jsp/whatever) instructions are inserted to dynamically fill in some
data. l-r-e-a-s provides a model of XSLT usage that more closely fits
that model and was (I think, I wasn't there) designed to encourage takup
of XSLT in that area.
David
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