Re: [xsl] variable question

[Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeni wondered:

> Looking again, I'm confused about what you're trying to do. Do you
> want $bibrecord to hold a sequence of all the documents whose paths
> are bib-data/X.mods where X is the value of the linkend of a
> <biblioref> within your document?

... and Mike followed up:

> I can't correct it for you because it's not clear to me what you meant 
> to
> write.

Let me step back and *try* (it's not easy) to explain the larger issue 
I'm trying to address, which goes back to some previous posts.

I need to format citations and bibliographies.  The citations are in 
the document, and consist of pointers to a bibliographic records, 
identified with an ID attribute.

In my first cut at the stylesheets, I basically processed the citations 
and the bibliographies separately, and assumed the bibliographic data 
was embedded in the document.  This isn't very generalizable as a) 
formatting really needs to be driven by the citation, and b) in many 
cases, the source bib data is not going to be in the document.

The concrete example is this:

1)  I need to format citations as footnotes, and to distinguish between 
first occurrence in the text (a full citation), and subsequent (a 
shortened form).

2)  I want to integrate this all into an XML DB, where the XML bib data 
is residing in a collection separate from the document source.  Or, 
alternately, I want to store the bib data in a flat file database apart 
from the document source.

In the first case, then, the formatting of the citation depends on 
where each citation reference is in relation to others.  In the second, 
I need to be able to access those external bib elements and to work 
with them as a group (for example, to do grouping and sorting and so 
forth of that data).

Does that make any more sense?  As I said, I find it difficult to 
explain.

Bruce