Re: [syndication] Re: NITF XML feeds

[Rick Bradley <roundeye@roundeye.net>]

* mikerocks65 (kynast@ix.netcom.com) [040426 11:55]:
> Likely XSLT is something I need to learn.  It seems way too much to 
> go through for what should be a simple conversion.   I would also 
> hate to find out after spending time figuring out XSLT that I cannot 
> automatic it.

XSLT is not only automatable, it tends to be more automatable than
screen scraping, or writing programs to parse and transform XML
documents.  XSLT also tends to be vastly more maintainable (and robust
under changes) than a program in a modern programming language -- for
the tasks at which it excels.

Having written Perl code for over a decade I still find that my average
XSLT sheet is significantly smaller than a Perl script I'd write to
perform the same tasks.  Of course, I haven't tried to write an
accounting system or sysadmin tools in XSLT, so this is definitely just
a matter of "right tool for the job at hand".

I'm not going to get on the advocacy stump, because I know that the
learning curve has to be factored into any decision regarding technology
deployment.  I will say that learning XSLT wasn't overly difficult and
I'm happy now that I took the time to do it.

Rick
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