Re: [xsl] inheritance and encapsulation in xslt? / xslt for xlink?

[Howard Stearns <stearns@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Suppose I start with an empty specialized stylesheet, 
acme-corp-2html.xsl, that xsl:imports the general stylesheet, 
us-gaap-ci-2html.xsl.  Even without defining any templates of its own, 
acme-corp-2html.xsl will handle all the elements that the general 
stylesheet can handle. That's good.

However, the acme-corp instance documents uses many elements (let's say 
it could be hundreds) that are not present in generic us-gaap-ci 
instance documents. Assuming that the imported us-gaap-ci-2html.xsl just 
simplistically defines templates that match based on element names in 
the us-gaap-ci.xsd, these specialized Acme elements won't be matched by 
the imported templates.

I don't see how xsl:import helps me to get the generic 
us-gaap-ci-2html.xsl templates to apply to the new elements used by Acme 
corp. (Or am I missing something?)

I could manually determine the names of elements that are unique to 
acme-corp, and add template rules for each into acme-corp-2html.xsl. 
The bodies of these templates would be exactly the same as the templates 
of the corresponding elements in the included stylesheet. And there are 
thousands of companies like Acme Corp.

I want to be able to write versions of generic stylesheets (like 
us-gaap-ci-2html.xsl) that will work no only for us-gaap-ci.xsd instance 
documents, but also for any documents derived from us-gaap-ci that 
define their own more specialized elements.



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