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Re: [xsl] Re: Does anyone know how to make IE less useless for XSLT developement?

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Hey Terence,

It's good to see you have a good sense of humor. An important part of
any XSLT developers complete breakfast. :)

Feel rest assured that you are not the first, nor will you be the
last, to be left wondering why <xsl:attribute name="choo" /> doesn't
produce the expected result and <xsl:attribute name="{choo}" /> does. 
Fortunately a lot of tools are filling in the gaps, and many other
processors have made it of primary concern to output human readable
errors that don't leave you desirous to rip out each and every hair
follicle, one-by-one and/or all at once! :)

Keep smiling :D

On 2/24/06, Terence Kearns <terence.kearns@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 23/02/06, M. David Peterson <xmlhacker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi Terence,
> >
> > In reading back through this thread it seems I may have misjudged your
> > intentions... my apologies for that.  It seemed to me you were on a
> > mission to prove MSXML as a buggy hack, but it seems after reading a
> > bit more of this thread you may have just been a bit frustrated by
> > MSXML/IE's lack of any sort of extended error reporting, something I
> > will admit has been a frustrating point for a lot of folks, including
> > myself, throughout the years.
> >
>
> That's my fault because I got so frustrated that I penned a dodgey
> subject line in my haste. No I'm not on any sort of mission and I
> don't work for Microsoft conspiracy theorists inc. :)
> I think the crux of the matter is the immaturity of the XSLT1 spec.
> Thanks to Mr Mac for pointing that out. Making it optional for the
> processor to report an error has been the source of my furstration.
>
> I'm glad for the advice from people on this list about things like
> setting up a test harness and which XSLT processors to test with. The
> three that I used were Transformiix, Sablotron, and the one built into
> XML Spy. I guess my XSLT development is only a small portion of what I
> do so I haven't prioritised a dedicated development environement for
> it.
>
> > One thing I think you can be certain of; when things simply do not
> > make any sense, and you have no other explanation, pinging this list
> > with a quick snippet of code, and a question as to what might be
> > wrong, will most definitely gain you a response. :)
>
> Well I'm glad I posted the query. I'll just use a less provocative
> subject line next time. The reason why I didn't post the code is
> bacuase there was so much of it, and until I went through the painfull
> commenting out procedure, I had no idea which include the problem was
> located in. I don't care what anyone says, the problem would not have
> even made it to the list if IE had simply reported the line number and
> file location. I don't expect it to be a development platform but that
> error message is just not adequate.
>
> Thanks for the tip on CTRL-refresh. I have actually tried this as well
> as disabling the cache. IT STILL DOES NOT REFRESH THE STYLESHEET.
>
> In the end, once I located the line of code where the error was, I
> looked up the usage of xsl:attribute in Dave's reference book and
> found the bit about "attribute value templates". That's when I
> inserted the curly braces and fixed the problem. One of the things
> that makes XSLT difficult for anyone who is not a full-time XSLT
> developer, is subtlties like knowing that "arguments" to XSL
> directives need to be attribute value templates or literals. It is not
> consistent throughout the language. It very much depends on which
> directive attribute you are using.
>
> for instance. If my source is <foo bar="choo" />
>
> and I want to create an attribute 'choo', I can do it like
> <xsl:attribute name="choo" />
> But if I want to use the source to specify the name, I can use
> <xsl:attribute name="{@bar}" /> assuming foo is in context
> But then hang on, using he logic that the expression above is
> EVALUATED, should a literal way of specifying attribute name be
> <xsl:attribute name="'choo'" />
> ??? like you would using
> but then I suppose it's like saying
> <xsl:attribute name="{'choo'}" />
> It's not obvious to the untrained eye. Or myabe it's just me.
> I guess a good way to think about it would be to considder
> <xsl:param name="choo" select="'choo'" />
>
>


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<M:D/>

M. David Peterson
http://www.xsltblog.com/

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