Re: Rethinking XSLT 2.0 design

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

Keith Fahlgren <abdelazer@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Norm,
>
> On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 4:59 AM, Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> wrote:
>> I'm going to be turning my hands to the XSLT 2.0 stylesheets for
>> DocBook again soon, partly with an eye towards making them more
>> production ready, partly to try a few experiments.
>
> Thanks for clarifying that you'll be working on these stylesheets
> again, especially in light of Jirka's Google Summer of Code project.
>
> I think your ideas about dropping normalization, segmenting the
> stylesheets into discrete processing chunks rather than always
> creating a massive, unified stylesheet, and potentially not seamlessly
> handling DB4 are all prudent and justified. What I'd like to
> understand is your current thinking on the top three goals of the
> XSLT2 reimplementation itself. What are they?

I've written about that a little bit, for example:

  http://norman.walsh.name/2004/07/27/titlepages

but in terms of top three goals, I'd have to say:

1. Move to XSLT 2.0 techniques to both streamline and simplify the
   stylesheets but also to make them easier to customize and extend.

2. They've grown by accretion for a decade or so, it's time they got
   a little top-down refactoring and organization.

3. They should be better documented and there should be tests for
   everything.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Where it is permissible both to
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | die and not to die, it is an abuse
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | of valour to die.-- Mencius

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