Best practices XSLT

I'm pleased to see that my own findings in programming with XSLT match the ones from Andrew Welch:

1. don't use xsl:for-each, use xsl:apply-templates
2. don't use named templates, use xsl:apply-templates with a mode
3. if a template just contains a choose/when, separate out the branches into individual templates
4. instead of xsl:value-of use xsl:apply-templates
5. one large template is bad, lots of specific small templates is good

Regarding (4): xsl:value-of will create a text node in the result tree, xsl:apply-templates will ultimately apply templates on the text node where the default template will kick in and copy it to the result tree... so the effect is the same, however in the latter case you are making it available for overriding.

so for example:

you could do:



or you could do:


both will output the same result.

Now if a requirement comes in to wrap the type in <b>, but only if its 'beer', if you have used apply-templates you can just add the
template:


...and then go home. However if you have use value-of earlier on,
you would need to go and modify that template first to change it to an apply-templates anyway.