XSLTXT: An Alternative XSL Syntax
=================================

OVERVIEW
--------
*This overview was copied from the original XSLTXT website: http://www.zanthan.com/ajm/xsltxt/docs.html *

Why a different syntax?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The XML syntax for XSLT is very easy to parse, as it's XML, relatively easy to read, but tedious to write once you get past the simplest transformations. I find that the semantics of XSLT get swamped by the syntax of XML. For example, the number of characters used for xml markup can be very large compared to the number used for the actual semantics of the transformations. For example, if you want to write a simple template with a name of foo that takes two parameters and generates a statement like SELECT x FROM y you can write the template element below. This uses approximately 122 characters for markup and 22 for meaning.

      
<xsl:template name="foo">
  <xsl:param name="a"/>
  <xsl:param name="b"/>
SELECT <xsl:value-of select="$a"/> FROM <xsl:value-of select="$b"/>
</xsl:template>
    

In contrast the alternative syntax can express this using only 31 characters of markup and 22 characters for meaning, as shown below. I hope that this makes the meaning clearer and it is certainly quicker to write.

      
tpl .name "foo" ("a", "b")
  "SELECT "
  val "$a"
  " FROM "
  val "$b"
    

XSLTXT makes no changes to XSLT semantics. The things that are tedious to do in XSLT are still tedious in XSLTXT but at least there is less typing. The advantage of this approach is that in Java a XMLReader can be constructed that will parse an XSLTXT file and produce SAX events as if an XSLT file was being processed. XSLTXT can therefore be used in place of XSLT without having to build another XSLT processor.

Basic principles
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

XSLTXT does four things to try to reduce the number of markup characters.

    * Use indentation to delimit the block structure instead of start and end markers.
    * Reduce the length of some of the names used, for example template becomes tpl
    * Required attributes no longer have attribute names, instead they are positional.
    * In some situations param and with-param statements can be written using parentheses. 

BUILD
-----
The XSLTXT library (a JAR file) can be compiled, tested, and installed in your local repo
by using Maven:

    mvn install

All dependencies are included in the pom.xml file. 

There is a slight problem with the xerces the implementation of non
default entity resolvers. In some situations the entity resolver will
be passed a null publicId to the resolveEntity method. This is fixed 
in the current cvs sources for xerces. For now the 
BasicResolver.resolveEntity method in xsltxt issues a warning in this
situation and returns null to invoke default resolution, which works
fine.

LICENSE
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The code for xsltxt is licensed under the conditions of the
Lesser GNU Public License. See the file COPYING for more information.

xsltxt uses code licensed under a variety of other licenses. See the
various LICENSE.* files.