Compound style sheets

Subject: Compound style sheets
From: "John E. Simpson" <simpson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 18:28:34 -0500
[I haven't yet plowed through all of the latest XSL WD, let alone
considered all the implications of its features; in particular, I don't
have enough of a grasp of the syntax yet to post sample code -- apparently
de rigueur on xsl-list :). So apologies in advance if this is a naive
question/suggestion. That said....]

A discussion current on XML-DEV involves standardizing the representation
of certain common data "types" -- not the atomic sorts (integer, float,
string, etc.), but higher-level semantic types which can be expected to be
needed across XML applications. These include dates, currency, names,
addresses, phone numbers, and so on. One party to the discussion mentioned
XSL in this context, and that made me wonder:

Would it be useful to establish an ad-hoc "committee" whose sole charge
would be the development of standard XSL transforms for these sorts of
data? These standard transforms could be imported, included, or embedded as
necessary in application-specific style sheets, and provide standard
conversions of representation as necessary. (Note that this doesn't mean
conversions of *values* -- I'm not proposing anything like a dollar-to-euro
calculator.)

The general idea is that document foo.xml might contain, say, numbers and
dates which would need to be transformed for presentation in Europe as e.g.
1.000,234 and 31/12/1999. It seems to me that these sorts of
transformations (or are they formatting? hmm, here comes that can of worms
again) would be fairly trivial in XSL, but there would be enough variations
to make reinvention of the wheel undesirable and error-prone. The "standard
transforms" could be posted in publicly-accessible URIs at, say, the OASIS
site.

Just wondering.

Thanks,
JES

=================================================
John E. Simpson
simpson@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.flixml.org
Just XML - Now available from Prentice-Hall


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