Re: [xsl] Basic Question about Adding Styles to XSL

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michelle,

> My question is - is this the best way to do it?

You are proposing a perfectly good way to do it. Whether it is the 
best way depends on external factors such as how you intend to 
maintain your CSS (is it a benefit to do so inside the XSLT?) and 
whether you mind the extra bandwidth of serving it over and over 
again inside many pages, or would rather have recipients cache it on 
their systems (an advantage of out-of-line CSS). In other words, the 
usual CSS architecture tradeoffs.

> Can I add a link to an external style sheet in the XSL?

Absolutely. From the XSL point of view, such an HTML <link/> element 
is just another result element, no different from any other. The HTML 
file that results would have to be located (statically or 
"virtually", if served up at request) someplace where the link 
resolves properly when the client looks for it; but that's not an 
XSLT issue either.

If you look at the HTML source code of the files served up by my 
XML/XSLT demo application the Sonneteer 
(http://www.xmlshoestring.com/Sonneteer) you'll see they call out to 
external CSS files, which are served up by Apache Cocoon just like 
the XSLT transformation results.

It's also possible to have CSS both in and out of line, again in the usual way.

Cheers,
Wendell