David,

I am grateful to you for your very clear and elegant solution!

Wendell,

thank you for your proposition which is almost as good as David's, but which I personally find more difficult to follow. And it requires the stylesheet to explicitly state the element names, which might be a little inconvenient.

You wrote:

> I'm a bit puzzled by your statement that you don't want to "hardwire
> the structure of the tree to create", since that's exactly what the
> style_nesting element does (and fairly neatly too).

What I meant was: Since I am using the "real" meta-stylesheet method (as opposed to how you characterized your proposal) to generate the stylesheet which is doing the WordprocessingML transformation, I prefer to make the style transformation configurable, by specifying the element equivalents of the styles as well as their nesting in an external XML document with a structure that could look like the one I showed:

<style_nesting>
  <b><i><u/></i></b>
</style_nesting>

So it's certainly somehow hard-wired in XML, but not necessarily in XSL.
Now I have become aware that this opens two ways:

1) Being totally dynamic, i.e. reading in the mapping and hierarchy description at the operating stylesheet's run time. This is what David's method does.

2) Being dynamic only in the first step, i.e. generating an operating stylesheet with the style mapping coded in it. This is one aspect of Wendell's solution.

I'll try to experiment with both to find the approach which is more favorable. (And I will have to refine the mapping technique to account for more complex cases than local name identity.)

A.
<xsl:template match="x">
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="$cond">
      <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
      </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
      <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

B.
<xsl:template match="x">
  <xsl:variable name="out">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="$cond">
      <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:copy-of select="$out"/>
      </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
      <xsl:copy-of select="$out"/>
    </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

Cheers,
Wendell

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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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