Re: [2.2] Reference to Tool Behaviour Out Of Scope?

[Paul Grosso <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 20:26 1998 09 09 -0400, G. Ken Holman wrote:
>[2.2] Reference to Tool Behaviour Out Of Scope?

>  "Users are free to order the elements as they 
>  prefer, and stylesheet creation tools need not 
>  provide control over the order in which the 
>  elements occur."
>
>I feel this technology specification should not comment on tool behaviour
>of tools not related to the _processing_ of XSL (the user interface of a
>stylesheet creation tool is, in my opinion, unrelated to the processing of
>that stylesheet).
>
>This comment "jumped out at me" (those of you who have known me for a while
>will remember my feelings :{)} about certain tools not providing control of
>the order of generated tool output) and I recommend that this phrase be
>removed.

I believe Ken's last paragraph is saying that he would prefer that
stylesheet editing tools NOT rearrange the order of the rules in the
stylesheet that he created.  This issue is out of scope of the XSL
spec (which, I believe, is precisely Ken's point).  

What is in scope is the following design issue (stated to
present my view of what it should be):  *if* such a tool (or user)
*did* rearrange the order of rules for any reason, it should not 
change how the document styled with this stylesheet is presented.

Some users like to order things in alphabetical order of target element,
others in some logical [to the user's mind] grouping (possibly modularizing
the stylesheet using several included fragments), and still others
just throw in new rules at the bottom of the stylesheet.  The various 
rules in a stylesheet should be able to be in any order without having 
the order affect which rule is used in what case (except perhaps as a
final arbiter in an "error recovery" situation).


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