Re: [xsl] inheritance and encapsulation in xslt? / xslt for xlink?

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Howard,

At 05:36 PM 7/21/2003, you wrote:
> I could write an acme-corp-2html.xsl and a world-financial-corp-2html.xsl 
> and a zillion others, each including or importing us-gaap-ci-2ht03.xsl. I 
> don't mind defining templates for those company-specific elements that I 
> truly want handled in a company-specific way. However, a large number of 
> the company-specific elements (oftentimes all of them) should just be 
> handled in the same way as the corresponding elements in the basic 
> us-gaap-ci.xsd.

This sounds like exactly the case that xsl:import is designed to address: 
specific templates for a specific document type (or subset thereof), 
falling back on templates in an imported stylesheet for those elements 
shared between this document type and others. The xsl:import mechanism 
provides the override/fallback functionality.

But it sounds like you have examined xsl:import and found it wanting. Could 
you be specific as to what functionality you require that it doesn't provide?

Yet if xsl:import doesn't do it, I'm afraid the answer to your last 
question is "no":

> Alas, XBRL does not appear to be set up to define this "class" 
> infrastructure. On the other hand, the DITA stuff predates .xsd and XLink, 
> so I'm hoping that there's now some standard way of dealing with this 
> problem that will work with XBRL .xsd's. My "QUICK SIMPLE QUESTION (that 
> could avoid all that follows, below)" was a guess (fantasy?) of how that 
> standard way might work.
>
> So, is there a standard example or methodology for this?

For a functionality provided by DITA, you should ask them.... :-> So-called 
"standards" in this area, as you have surely observed, are as often 
standards by intent more than they are standards by practice. Many a 
standard has been designed (or mostly designed) and floated, but never made 
it away from the dock. Likewise, it may be too much to hope for a standard 
way of integrating standards that are themselves hardly underway.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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