Clark C. Evans wrote:
> Many people want scripts beacuse the "modulization" abilities
> of XSLT leave alot to be desired, i.e., making a template and
> calling a template are just too verbose.

That's not the primary reason I could imagine wanting user-defined
functions. I can imagine two situations that this would not help:

1. for getting information about the system in ways impossible in
XSLT, like getting the current date, testing whether a file or
directory exists, or pulling information out of a database from within
a stylesheet

2. for accessing templates within XPath predicates - for example if I
write a funky regexp match template then I'd like to be able to use it
to select all nodes whose value matches a particular regexp

There are ways around both these current limitations - you can pass
the current date and so on in as a parameter, and you can (in XSLT
1.1) construct an RTF holding copies of or references to the relevant
nodes to get the second functionality - but they're very unweildy.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/



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