Re: [Exist-development] New list member offering services :)

[Wolfgang M. <wol...@ex...>]

> I dont think that doing basic document to document conversion in
> XQuery makes any sense, XSLT is easier to develop this in and more
> intuitive.

I think this is a misunderstanding. A simple document to document
transformation can sometimes be even more intuitive in XQuery ;-) All
you need to learn is typeswitch plus a few function calls. I'm using
this more and more in my own code (for example, see
http://exist.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/exist/trunk/eXist/webapp/biblio/jquery.xql?revision=11607&view=markup).
Done in the right way, the control flow in an XQuery can be easier to
understand and maintain than the template matching mechanism of XSLT.

Don't misunderstand me. I like XSLT. I use a pretty large XSLT to
generate multi-volume, 1000 pages PDFs from a set of TEI documents
stored in eXist. The processing only takes a few minutes, despite the
thousands of small queries it sends to eXist, e.g. to assemble
bibliographies and SVG graphics. However, this also shows the
limitations of XSLT: it becomes quite tricky once you need to
integrate data from many sources. Native XSLT support in eXist would
overcome this limit. It's on the way, but there's still a lot of work
left to be done.

Anyway, my main argument for using more XQuery for the website is that
you want to keep the examples as simple as possible and reduce the
number of standards new users have to learn.

Wolfgang