I taught myself XSLT last Thursday, and I must admit I’m in two minds about it.
On the one hand, it’s a really nice way to deal with many common transformations, but on the other hand, I’m getting sick and tired of typing <xsl: all the time.
It’d be really nice to have a preprocessor to transform a somewhat saner syntax to real XSLT. What I imagine is something that would allow me to write something like this:
exec entity-ref (name="nbsp");
print "<b>\n";
if xsl:* {
print "x"
}
print "</b>\n";
print $name(.);
instead of this:
<xsl:call-template name="entity-ref">
<xsl:with-param name="name">nbsp</xsl:with-param>
</xsl:call-template>
<b>
<xsl:if test="xsl:*">
<xsl:text>x</xsl:text>
</xsl:if>
</b>
<xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
Has anybody done that yet? Or will I have to do that myself if I want it badly enough? Is there any good reason for not doing it (apart from not getting begin and end tags matched for free in cases such as <b>...</b> above)?