An XSLT sweetener

This post is more than 15 years old.

Posted at 08:00 on 17 November 2008

If you've ever done anything with XSLT, you'll no doubt be wondering why anyone would want to use such a verbose programming language, given that you need to churn out code such as this all over the place:

<xsl:element name="foo">
  <xsl:attribute name="bar">
    <xsl:value-of select="/some/xpath/@expression" />
  </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:element>

However, did you know that you can do this instead? Much cleaner and easier to read:

<foo bar="{/some/xpath/@expression}" />

(Hat tip: Ned Batchelder)