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[xsl] Re: _why_ do people use xsl:element and xsl:attribute so much Was Re: [xsl] xslt svg problem

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> I found them easier to understand when I was starting to climb the
> learning curve.

It seems like you are not alone, which is really why I asked the
question, because I don't understand why that is so. Which sometimes
makes it hard to give helpful, as opposed to my usual terse & grumpy:-),
comments....

It seems to me that the whole ethos of xslt is that you have a
"template" that is more or less a copy of what you are trying to
produce, into which you scatter the odd instruction from the xslt/xpath
where required. thus to generate an "a" element with an
attribute href you just do that:

<a href="
but at this point drop into Xpath (inside {})
 {@xlink:href}"
and then finish off the element start tag
>

This just seems so much simpler than

<xsl:element name="a">
 <xsl:attribute name="href">
   <xsl:value-of select="@xlink:href"/>
 </xsl:attribute>

That I would say that xsl:element and xsl:attribute only be used (or
shown to) advanced users who are needing to generate the
element/attribute names based on the run time behaviour of the
stylesheet rather than the far more usual case of generating fixed names
from the stylesheet or source.

David

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