Formal parameters for stylesheets

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


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