Use Pug to transform XML, instead of XSLT. Why? At my office, we call the XSLT book the Token of Pain. Whoever touched the XSLT code last has it on their desk, and is responsible for being the current expert. That person hates their life until someone else needs the book badly enough to take on the pain.
Also, you can't easily generate HTML5 with XSLT because of the doctype and tags
like <meta> that don't get closed.
npm install -g xmlpug
Write templates like this:
doctype html
html
head
meta(charset='utf-8')
meta(name='author', content=$$('front/author/@fullname'))
title= $('front/title/text()')
where the $ and $$ functions perform xpath queries in a source XML document. $ returns the first match, or null. $$ always returns an array of all of the matches. So given the following XML input:
<rfc>
<front>
<title abbrev="HTML RFC">HyperText Markup Language Request For Comments Format</title>
<author initials="J." surname="Hildebrand" fullname="Joe Hildebrand" role="editor"/>
<author initials="H." surname="Flanagan" fullname="Heather Flanagan" role="editor"/>
</front>
</rfc>
the above template would generate:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="author" content="Joe Hildebrand,Heather Flanagan">
<title>HyperText Markup Language Request For Comments Format</title>
</head>
</html>
The added JavaScript features available in the template are:
$(string, element): perform an XPath query against the input document, returning the first match. Text nodes are converted to strings, and attribute nodes are converted to the string versions of their values. If no matches are found, returnsnull. If an element is provided, search within that element, otherwise search from the root of the input document.$$(string, element): perform an XPath query against the input document, returning all of the matches as an array. Text nodes are converted to strings, and attribute nodes are converted to the string versions of their values. If no matches are found, returns[]. If an element is provided, search within that element, otherwise search from the root of the input document.$att(element, string): gets the text value of an attribute from an element with the name specified in the string. Returnsnullon errors.$source: a Buffer containing the original XML source before parsingrequire(string): wrapper around normal noderequireallowing it to work in a templateversion: the name and version number of xmlpug
Usage: xmlpug [options] <template> <input>
Options:
-h, --help output usage information
-V, --version output the version number
-d, --debug Add Pug debug information
-o, --output [file] Output file
-p, --pretty Pretty print
Docs coming soon.
