Describe at least four tips to keep in mind to promote the creation of clear, effective XSLT style sheets.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

XSLT style sheets need to be written clearly both to make the code easier for your colleagues to read and interpret and to minimize the chance of coding mistakes. Here are some tips to keep in mind as you develop your own style sheets.?• Build up your style sheet incrementally by adding only a few templates at a time. Verify that the style sheet works at each stage before introducing additional complexity.
• Add comments to your style sheet document to aid yourself and others in interpreting and revising the style sheet at a later time.
• Use templates in preference to thetag whenever possible. Templates are faster to process, easier to debug, and can be reused in different contexts throughout the style sheet.
• Use relative path expressions within templates andfor-eachloops. Any XPath expression should be interpreted relative to the context node and not rely on nodes defined outside of the template orfor-eachloop.
• Reduce errors and speed up processing by using theindent="no"attribute with the tag. This will remove extra white space and reduce the size of the result document. Note that the default value for HTML files isindent="yes", while for XML documents the default isindent="no".
• Use an XML editor and avoid coding by hand. This will cut down on typos and syntax errors.
• Use thetag to add comments to the result document, making it easier for others to interpret the code in that file.
• The web contains a wealth of free XSLT libraries. Before trying to solve a coding problem, check these libraries to see if a solution is already available.??