XSL Suggestion

[Paul Prescod <papresco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would like to suggest that one of the development goals of XSL be that
its declarative portion be as powerful as widely deployed declarative
stylesheet technologies like those in Panorama, the SGML editors and so
forth.

I expect that there will be many environments where only the baseline
declarative features of XSL will be implemented and users of those
products should not be deprived of well-understood, easy to implement
stylesheet features. I expect that the declarative portions will also be
the only parts that are amenable to GUI modification and other forms of
easily automated processing.

Off the top of my head, the only common feature that the declarative
subset of XSL is missing is some form of simple element numbering
facility. I have always manipulated declarative style sheet facilities
through GUIs, so I do not know if there exists a nice SGML-ish syntax
for simple numbering. I would be curious if others have encountered such
a thing (perhaps in FOSI?). I can't find an appropriate CSS spec., but I
think that they were looking at counters which introduce linear
dependencies and are thus not appropriate for XS. Perhaps something like
<ELEMENT-NUMBER>, <CHILD-NUMBER>, and <ELEMENT-NUMBER-RECURSIVE>
elements would solve 90% of the cases and the other 10% would need to
resort to JavaScript.

 Paul Prescod

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