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

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

Hi Joe,

> Even though I learned XSLT first before XQuery, I find it much easier
> to maintain XQuery than XSLT stylesheets, since that's what I work in
> 100% of the time now.  I converted a TEI-to-XHTML stylesheet from XSLT
> (65 templates) to XQuery (41 functions, including the master
> typeswitch) routine.

This is interesting to hear and confirms Dan's observations with which
I tend to agree (though I enjoy writing XSLT as well, but I probably
have enough training in it).

> Another question that has been raised is the DocBook 4 to 5
> transition.  I'm not familiar with DocBook, but given the benefits of
> DocBook 5 and using XQuery for transformation, how disruptive would it
> be to do *both* at once?  (1) Convert the eXist documentation to
> DocBook 5, and (2) convert the stylesheet from DocBook 4-oriented XSLT
> to DocBook 5-oriented XQuery?

This will not be a major effort. Most of the documentation only uses a
subset of docbook which should be easy to convert (maybe even
automatically, using an XSL?).

> Another factor to consider is that I count 23 XSL files in the
> "stylesheets" directory.  Should all of these be converted, or only
> "db2xhtml.xsl"?  If not all 23 need to be converted, which are the key
> ones?

db2xhtml.xsl is the only important one. It is used by nearly all pages
on the website. The others are either old (left over from Cocoon) or
only used for a single purpose (roadmap.xsl). One or two documents
(index.xml) are still using an old stylesheet (doc2html.xsl) and need
to be migrated to docbook.

Wolfgang