If your generation logic is at all sophisticated, XSLT is going to be a 
profoundly cumbersome way to express that logic. It is reasonably 
simple with boolean switches and simple loops, but anything more 
complex then that and you find yourself typing in 50 lines of XSLT to 
do what could be done in 5 lines in Ruby.

My personal website publishing experiment uses XSLT for very simple 
transformations, and then Ruby for anything at all complicated. Then 
you just have to find a way to stitch those two together.

Francis

On Oct 19, 2004, at 10:52 AM, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:

> Nice. Thanks you for such a great reply! Very informative.
>
> Why do you avoid XSLT? Because it is slow? Or?
>
> Thanks,
> T.
>
>
> On Tuesday 19 October 2004 10:44 am, Will Drewry wrote:
> | On the commandline, you can use xsltproc or xalan. (I'm sure there 
> are
> | others too). Both of these are apt-gettable in Debian. Xalan is from
> | the Apache Foundation. It's been pretty solid for a while now.
> |
> | I've also seen these ruby projects floating around :)
> |
> | http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-xslt/
> | http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/libxslt/
> | http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/xslt4r/
> |
> | Ruby-xslt looks to have had a new version was released just recently.
> | You'll probably want ruby-xpath to go with it too.
> |
> | The examples make it look as easy as this -
> |
> |   require 'xml/xslt'
> |
> |   xslt = XML::XSLT.new()
> |   xslt.xmlfile = "fuzface.xml"
> |   xslt.xslfile = "fuzface.xsl"
> |
> |   out = xslt.serve()
> |   print out;
> |
> | (This is also the libxslt-ruby package in Debian.)
> |
> | I have to admit, though, that I tend to avoid XSL transformations
> | except in the direst of circumstances, instead using Ruby itself as 
> my
> | transformation language (via the DOM, SAX, or REXML interfaces).
> |
> | Just my two cents. good luck,
> | wad
>
>