XSLStyle and oXygen

On almost every XSLT projects I worked on, I used Ken Holman's XSLStyle^TM. It enables one to document each stylesheet component (template, function, variable, module, etc.) using an XML vocabulary (DocBook and DITA are supported out of the box.) For instance, the following exerpt shows how to document a simple named template with a parameter, assuming the vocabulary has been set to DocBook:

<doc:template>
   <para>Create a paragraph with a greetings message.</para>
   <doc:param name="who">
      <para>The name of the person to address the greetings to.</para>
   </doc:param>
</doc:template>
<xsl:template name="greetings">
   <xsl:param name="who" as="xs:string"/>
   <h:p>
      <xsl:value-of select="concat('Hello, ', $who, '!')"/>
   </h:p>
</xsl:template>

XSLStyle^TM is a set of stylesheets to extract this information and format it to an HTML page. Besides this formating tasks, it also checks for best-practices (did you declare the type for parameters?, etc.) I think this is a very important piece in the XSLT writer's toolbox.

Seting a project up to use XSLStyle is as easy as adding a tranform task using the XSLStyle's stylesheets to transform the project's stylesheet to HTML pages. And of course to add documentation to the stylesheets. All that is very easy, but you always have to remember where to installed XSLStyle, check for the namespace URIs to use, and the exact element names to use to document your code. Once again, that's very easy, but repetitive and time-consuming.

I use oXygen more and more for a few months. And I really enjoy it. It helps a lot automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks: create a new stylesheet with the right namespace URIs, code completion for known vocabularies, tansform scenarii, etc. And for schemas, XQuery modules and WSDL definitions, it provides actions to generate documentation, the same way XSLStyle generates documentation for XSLT modules. Unfortunately, it does not support XSLStyle yet. Actually, the scenario attached to almost all of my stylesheets is the scenario using XSLStyle.

But having XSLStyle integrated within oXygen would bring several advantages. It would always be installed alongside with oXygen. I am a freelance consultant and move a lot between different companies, using several computers, with different system administration policies. Thanks to the per-person-license model of oXygen, and its platform independence, I can take it with me everywhere, and be quickly productive, without having to install separately a JRE, Saxon, FOP, Xerces, DocBook environment, RELAX NG tools, Schematron skeletons, Emacs with nXML and others modes, and even Cygwin to be able to create shell scripts and Makefile to automate tasks. But I still have to download XSLStyle separately, open one of its stylesheets to copy and paste a documentation sample and the correct namespace bindings. Of course, it would be time saving to have an XSLStyle framework directly in oXygen.

Besides that point, oXygen could offer editing facilities for stylesheet components documentation as well. When you want to document a named template with several parameters, you have to create the documentation structure as showed above, and create a doc:param element for each parameter, with the correct name. This could be automatically done with a specific action, to add an empty documentation structure to a particular component or even to each non-documented yet componnents in the stylesheet:

There would not have anymore the need to attach the stylesheet to an XSLStyle scenario neither. When I work on a stylesheet, I like to have its current scenario bound regarding what I am working on in particular. Switching back and forth between this scenario and the XSLStyle scenario does not really make sense. It would be more productive to have a Tools > Generate Documentation > XSLT Documentation... action as for the other file type, in my humble opinion.

And finally, oXygen would even be able to report some documentation errors directly in the editor pane, as wrong names in documenting parameters.

I hope oXygen team will be intersted to add support for XSLStyle, as this would be convenient, but also would spread XSLT writing best practices advocated by XSLStyle. Anyway, thanks to the team for listening to user requests, this is too rarely the case in other companies, and of course to Ken for XSLStyle.