Re: basic install, best practice, question

On 11 January 2005, Rob Hitchens wrote:
> The <xsl:import ..> tags throughout the library use relative paths to files
> and these never seem to work.  I'm constantly patching this to get
> transformations to work.  This can't be right, can it?

Sadly, it is. I don't know how it came to be in such a sorry state, but no one 
seems to be in a position to go through and fix up the entire library. I've 
been waiting for 1.5 years for a minor fix to one of the function 
_specifications_ to go through (an argument type is listed as string when it 
should be boolean) but it seems to have fallen through the cracks, as has
cleanup of all the improper xsl:import hrefs.

> Can someone describe the best practice for creating the exslt lib on a web 
> server (IIS)?  I've tried unzipping in a folder as well as inside the web 
> root, thinking that if only the files are correctly placed then everything 
> will snap together. No luck so far.

This really isn't made clear enough on the web site, but the stylesheets that 
you can download comprise sort of a slow, last-ditch backup implementation 
that you could use in order to graft partial EXSLT support onto an XSLT 
application.

Your first choice should be to look for an implementation that is native to 
your XSLT processor. Some XSLT processors have some degree of EXSLT support 
built-in (e.g., Saxon, Xalan, libxslt, 4Suite, Sablotron) and thus you can 
just invoke the functions/elements you need without importing any extra 
stylesheets whatsoever.  Others have it as an add-on (e.g., for MSXML, there 
is EXSLT for MSXML4 [1] and EXSLT.NET [2] and the related command-line utility 
nxslt [3]).

[1] http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=53841&package_id=85106
[2] http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=201eb290-5bf0-4452-9bf7-d21d39268f36
[3] http://www.tkachenko.com/dotnet/nxslt.html

> What am I missing here?  What's the best way to set up a lib containing all 
> templates and functions?

If you do end up needing to import stylesheets, you would be wasting gobs of
memory and slowing down stylesheet reading if you were to import everything
instead of just the templates you need.

-Mike