XSLT Is a Tool, Not a Religion
An old adage says that to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I don’t claim that XSLT is the solution to every business problem you’ll encounter. Chapter 1 discusses reasons why XML and XSLT were created and the design decisions behind XSLT, and it tries to identify the kinds of problems XSLT is designed to solve. All chapters in this book illustrate common scenarios in which XSLT is extremely powerful and useful.
That being said, if a particular tool does something better than
XSLT does, then by all means, use that other tool. For example, XSLT
has functions for sorting and grouping. If the data you’re
transforming comes from a relational database, it’s probably far more
efficient to use the ORDER BY and
GROUP BY features of your database
instead of sorting and grouping with XSLT. XSLT is a powerful addition
to your tool box, but that doesn’t mean you should throw out all your
other tools.
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