Designing XML for XSLT (Was: Re: [xsl] newbie: xsl:key and summation of substrings)

[Jeni Tennison <jeni at jenitennison dot com>]

Trevor Nash wrote:
>>I can not influence the content of this source document.
>
> I've lost count of the number of times I have seen this, most
> commonly with grouping type questions. Anybody got a theory as to
> why this happens? There must be thousands of person-hours being
> wasted.

When people design markup languages, they can't always predict every
use the information in the XML documents will be put to, plus they
don't necessarily know the strengths/limitations of every method of
processing the document. (It would be straightforward to sum amounts
with units using DOM or SAX, for example.)

Does anyone know of a set of guidelines for designing markup languages
for processing with XSLT? If not, it could be a useful resource to put
together somewhere. Things like:

 - keep numbers and units separate
 - be consistent in case use in attribute/element values
 - use namespaces to embed HTML in XML, not CDATA sections

Any others?

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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