RE: [xsl] XSL - Transforming 2 XSL stylesheets from 1 XML file

["Andrew Welch" <ajwelch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>     Andrew> fantasy land when they conceived the xml-stylesheet PI and
>     Andrew> its media type attribute - it was a bit naove to expect
>     Andrew> any mobile device to look for the PI with a 'handheld'
>     Andrew> media type, perform the transformation itself, and then
>     Andrew> get this univeral 'handheld' markup back that looks great
>     Andrew> on all mobile devices....
>
> Why is this naive? If a handheld device is going to the
> trouble of looking up an xml-stylesheet PI and performing the
> transformation, then it's trivial (compared with the step of
> performing the
> transformation) to select the right one.

It's naove because it's grouping all mobile devices under the one handheld
banner - if you can only specify one stylesheet for all handheld devices in
the world then the markup it generates will have to be pretty generic.  It's
just not feasible.


>     Andrew> The whole idea of associating a stylesheet with an XML
>     Andrew> document by hard-coding it into the XML is wrong
>
> It certainly isn't wrong - it's an excellent idea, enabling
> clients to offload work from busy servers

It certainly is wrong - it's an awful idea.  Offloading work from the server
to the client is a good idea (but still debatable), but achieving that through
embedding links to the stylesheet in the XML is just wrong - it ties that XML
to that stylesheet forever more.  It's hardly been a success story has it?
What's needed is a far more flexible approach.

>     Andrew> it's a practice best avoided.
>
> This is harder to argue against, given the lamentable state
> of existing implementations.

Blame the spec, not the implementations, it was a bad idea from start (it is
possible that JC couldn't see into the future and misjudged some things).