Re: XSLT 4/99 Spec

I have been working with XSLT to produce HTML UI's from purely non-UI
XML data representing various states.

This spurs a couple of comments:

  1) A few more string routines would be -really- helpful.
     For instance, I would like to have a Java MessageFormat-like
     XSL translation template.  The problem is that there is no
     string replace functionality.  Moreover, substring-before() should
     really return the entire first argument if the second argument is
     not found in it -- this would allow a much cleaner implementation
     of first-instance replace.

     As it is I have a nasty bit of hard-wired XSL code that allows
     up to 3 args to be replaced (i.e. '{0} is a {1} of {2}').

  2) I parse the "Accept-Language" header in a Java servlet and send
     it into the XSL as an input parameter.  This is all well and
     good, but it is minimally useful because xsl:import and
     xsl:include do not allow expressions!  If they did I could
     write
       <xsl:include href='concat("translationBundle_",$locale,".xsl")'/>

Item (1) is obnoxious.

Item (2) is a severe limitation.  I now have to have each XSL file
translated (granted I can use xsl:variable to separate out the
translation strings), rather than having separately translated resource
bundles included from my main XSL files as I'd naively planned [I had
assumed that xsl:include allowed XSL expressions].

Received on Monday, 28 June 1999 19:55:16 UTC