Yuhang Sun

XSLT is a declarative language designed for transforming XML documents into documents in any format. In developing large-scale XSLT scripts, software qualities such as flexibility and maintainability become issues. To address those issues, this article will first discuss a design approach that emphasizes a decomposition and recomposition view of transformations; then, a technique for modularizing XSLT scripts will be described; and finally, a few design patterns will be introduced. Identify Responsibilities and Assign Them to Code Units The goal of any kind of application design is to divide responsibilities into smaller pieces and conquer them in separated code units. In XSLT, call-by-name templates, call-by-context templates, and global variables are code units, which are equivalent to functions in structured programming languages. Global variables are equivalent t... (more)