Graydon said the following on 03/27/2014 12:18 PM:
I've never got anybody to believe XSLT was easy; I have got people to
believe it was powerful, and I suspect the best way to evangelize for
XSLT is along that axis. "Here are things we can do reliably that are
much harder any other way".
Remarkably, I *have* gotten people to believe XSLT is easy -- and those have
almost always been people who are not traditional programmers!
Of course, these folks aren't doing complex transformations. But they are
people, who for one reason or another, have been given XML to deal with, and
just want to produce a nice HTML page or convert to a different XML format.
I've shown these folks just three elements, wrapped in a single <xsl:template
match="/">:
1. xsl:value-of
2. xsl:choose
3. xsl:for-each
and only enough XPath to understand something like "//book[@author='Bob']".
This is not "Hello World" -- which I have always considered a useless exercise
for anything other than testing a compile/build environment. But it is what I
call an 80-20 solution: 80% of what you want, for 20% of the effort.
The people I've shown this to have done a lot of great things with just these
three elements, and some have gone on to learn a lot more of XSLT. Funny that
the non-programmers have been easier to convert than the hot-shot hackers. ;-)
--Rich
--
Richard Fozzard, Computer Scientist
Geospatial Metadata at NGDC: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/metadata
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)
Univ. Colorado & NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Enterprise Data Systems
325 S. Broadway, Skaggs 1B-305, Boulder, CO 80305
Office: 303-497-6487, Cell: 303-579-5615, Email:
richard(_dot_)fozzard(_at_)noaa(_dot_)gov
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