Re: stylesheets for stylesheets (was Re: Swapping table rows and columns)

[Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

/ "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> was heard to say:
| An architecturally aware DSSSL processor, such as JADE, can act on a
| CSLDSSSL modeled stylesheet directly.
| 
| I believe Norm Walsh subsequently used this technique in his DOCBOOK works.

I did for a while. The problem I encountered was that my
DocBook/DSSSL architecture had to use the FPI for DocBook 3.0 or
DocBook 3.1 and whichever I chose caused problems for about 1/3
of the people using my stylesheets. So I gave up. The result is
still in the distribution, though.

As far as stylesheets for stylesheets go, it's perfectly
workable.  I've started using it in my DocBook XSL Stylesheets
for end-user customization.

The lack of a list data type in XSL means that some things that
were easy in DSSSL would be quite tricky in XSL. For example,
specifying the list of metainformation elements that should be
formatted on a titlepage. So now I have a "template" document
that describes these things and if you process the template
document with the template stylesheet, it produces the XSL
stylesheet that is a customization of the base DocBook
stylesheet that does the custom behavior. <whew/>

                                        Cheers,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx>      | Some people can tell what time it
http://nwalsh.com/                 | is by looking at the sun, but I've
                                   | never been able to make out the
                                   | numbers


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