sam.heard signatureSam Heard wrote: > What we need is an XSL Script that consumes XML archetypes ...
Hi Sam, XSLT is ok in small doses, but it becomes unmaintainable for anything complex. Other approaches share the advantages claimed at http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/dev/Archetype+to+HTML: "It can be used anywhere and on any platform and should easily allow localisation. Many people know how to tweak and maintain XSL." Just about any language these days has XML parsing libraries. Almost any language would be more maintainable than XSLT (even something as grotty as Perl). The transforms for XML archetypes would become quite complex, I imagine, especially with the localisation requirement. My own experience with XSLT is summarised by the second-last paragraph of http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200103/msg00647.html: '... developers whom I know are going over the same path with XSLT : "It is cool and simple - It is cool and complex - It is complex and it does not look cool for me".' But why generate the HTML from XML archetypes rather than ADL? There's already a solid, cross-platform ADL parser. Why not use that? - Peter
