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January 27, 2006
XSLT once every six months
XSLT, a functional language for tranforming XML documents, is one of those programming languages I use for a couple days no more than twice a year. Each time I use it I get faster at learning it.
Matt wrote a big part of one configuration tool as an XML file mapping a public interface for configuration onto the private, internal interface. He's write to do the mapping in a declarative language. Furthermore I can generate reference documentation directly from his map file.
The biggest problem I have with XSLT in this case is that the documentation generated from his map file consists of multiple files. You cannot do that in a non-implementation-dependent way with the 1.0 version of the language. In 2.0 the functionality is there, but the tools don't seem to recognize 2.0, yet.
So I'm dumping it all into a single stream of output, then writing a tool to clip the big stream into little documents.
Another problem I found is how I don't really know how to think in a functional language where the basic unit is a tree. Took longer than expected.
Posted by Mark at January 27, 2006 02:06 PM
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