Subject: Formal parameters for stylesheets From: Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1999 23:04:02 -0600 |
Getting a couple of things off of my chest: -- XSL stylesheets should be able to take formal parameters that control their behavior. Those parameters could be specified on the command line, in a browse dialog or in the stylesheet association link/processing instruction. DSSSL specifications almost always take formal parameters but the hacks that people have invented to allow them are all ...er... gross. People do things like automatically generating stylesheet bits, changing their document instance and so forth. That's ingenuity but it isn't what we should be forced to do. The only one that is not gross is overriding the value of a variable from outside. The problem with that mechanism is that there is no way that a GUI or command line tool can know which variables are supposed to be overriden and which ones are not. They just must "trust the user." It also means that a GUI cannot *prompt* for the appropriate paramaters. --- Let me also point out that it is absolutely vital that XSL be able to work with a hyperlinked web of document trees. One document at a time is NOT good enough by any stretch of the imagination. (similar hacks must be divised to work around this limitation in transformation languages that exhibit it) Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco "Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels." --Faith Whittlesey XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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