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copied!<p>I have found XSLT to be quite difficult to work with.</p> <p>I have had experience working on a system somewhat similar to the one you describe. My company noted that the data we were returning from "the middle tier" was in XML, and that the pages were to be rendered in HTML which might as well be XHTML, plus they'd heard that XSL was a standard for transforming between XML formats. So the "architects" (by which I mean people who think deep design thoughts but apparently never code) decided that our front tier would be implemented by writing XSLT scripts that transformed the data into the XHTML for display.</p> <p>The choice turned out to be disastrous. XSLT, it turns out, is a pain to write. And so all of our pages were difficult to write and to maintain. We would have done much better to have used JSP (this was in Java) or some similar approach that used one kind of markup (angle brackets) for the output format (the HTML) and another kind of markup (like <%...%>) for the meta-data. The most confusing thing about XSLT is that it is written in XML, and it translates from XML to XML... it is quite difficult to keep all 3 different XML documents straight in one's mind.</p> <p>Your situation is slightly different: instead of authoring each page in XSLT as I did, you only need to write ONE bit of code in XSLT (the code to convert from templates to display). But it sounds like you may have run into the same kind of difficulty that I did. I would say that trying to interpret a simple XML-based DSL (domain specific language) like you are doing is NOT one of the strong points of XSLT. (Although it CAN do the job... after all, it IS Turing complete!)</p> <p>However, if what you had was simpler: you have data in one XML format and wanted to make simple alterations to it -- not a full page-description DSL, but some simple straightforward modifications, then XSLT is an excellent tool for that purpose. It's declarative (not procedural) nature is actually an advantage for that purpose.</p> <p>-- Michael Chermside</p>

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