Re: ANN: XSLTDoc Alpha

Michel Goossens wrote:
> As I am looking in detail at Norm's XSL-FO stylesheets of DocBook, I have
> a hard time following the way variables, parameters, and modes are used
> and defined. Therefore, in the same spirit as Jeni's stylesheet, does 
> anybody know of work that went on in making a stylesheet (or building the
> functionality into an XLS parser) that can produce a cross-reference list
> of places which templates are defined/referenced, with which
> parameters (if they are named), and modes. Also, where variables are
> defined and used. As modular stylesheet design distributes definitions and
> references over a lot of files, to a "newcomer" it is not always evident
> where to look if one wants to customize the titlepage or the running
> headers, for instance. Thanks for any information about such a tool.

The XSLTDoc application gives you:

1. links to the called template from any xsl:call-template instruction
2. links to the definitions of the variables/parameters wherever
they're used
3. sortable summary tables giving template matches and modes

It's all import/include aware, and tells you when a particular named
template, variable declaration and so on are overridden in
importing stylesheets.

Getting linking done with matching/moded templates is a goal, but it's
pretty tricky especially as there may be *several* templates that
match in a particular case, and it's really impossible to know which
will do so without having a specific source XML instance.

David C. wrote:
>> Load it into what?
>
> Since MSXML3 came out we have, I fear, lost Jeni to the clutches of the
> evil empire.

But they're not evil, just misunderstood! ;)

I'm very sorry to everyone for not giving better instructions.
xslt-doc.xsl should be loaded into IE5 with MSXML3(preferably release
version) for it to run.

Creating all the possible permutations for the files in a batch
process would have generated *HUGE* numbers of HTML files, and it
would have felt less like an click-to-run application. Doing it
dynamically server-side would be an option but would require people to
have Apache/Cocoon running on their computers, and frankly they're
more likely to have IE5.

OK, maybe I'm getting a bit defensive here...

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/



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