Re: [xsl] Re: Language-specific output

Subject: Re: [xsl] Re: Language-specific output
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 12:36:50 -0500
Dear George,

If a stylesheet isn't valid on its own when the user initiates validation, perhaps the user could be prompted to nominate another stylesheet (i.e. the main one) to validate in its place. Perhaps this setting could be "sticky" in a session.

That is, I'm in favor of option 1, except I'd like the default behavior to be to validate this stylesheet, with the option of validating another one offered only if there's trouble.

As far as the difficulty of having many of these to set when an import tree is complex, perhaps this is the point when heuristics could be applied to a project, and a likely candidate or candidates for "main stylesheet" nominated in a pick-list. That would alleviate some of the burden, while allowing developers to retain control.

I've sometimes had modules that had more than one calling stylesheet, after all (it's part of the point of a modular design), so I'd rather not leave this completely up to the machine to decide.

Cheers,
Wendell

At 08:20 AM 2/2/2006, you wrote:
When you perform a stylesheet validation in oXygen it tries to create a Transformer out of that using the XSLT processor you have configured for XSLT validation. By default that is Saxon 6.5.5 for XSLT 1.0 and SaxonB 8.6.1 for XSLT 2.0.

Now it is true that some stylesheets are not valid by themselves but are ok if they are imported or included from other stylesheets. In fact this is one of the things we discussed recently internally at oXygen and I would like to get some feedback from XSLT users. Basically for a stylesheet module (that is not intended to be used by itself) the validation should be performed on the main stylesheet (on the one that includes/imports directly or indirectly the module).

Now the problem is how that situation is handled:

1. One possibility is to allow the user to specify the main stylesheet through some action (for instance click on a button and enter the main stylesheet in a dialog).

2. Another approach is to analyze all the stylesheets from the current project and see how they are related wrt include/import and determine automatically the main stylesheet.

Both these approaches have bad points.

In the first case if there are a lot of modules the user has to make a lot of actions to specify for each module the main stylesheet and that may be annoying.

In the second case analyzing all the stylesheets in the project can take some time and after doing that it is possible to get more possible master stylesheets and in that case the user action will be required to determine the actual main stylesheet to be used.

So, what would you prefer? If you want to work in a totally different way, how would that be?

Best Regards,
George
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George Cristian Bina
<oXygen/> XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger
http://www.oxygenxml.com


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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