RE: stylesheet expansion

Since the original question involved the reduction of dependency on
paths and required a single stylesheet with the import precedences
converted to priorities, I'd say my reply here is slightly off-topic,
but I'd like to chime in while Abel has brought up the subject.

I use a type of single-file stylesheet collection system, nearly
identical to what Abel defines below, in a personal project of mine. My
intentions are slightly different, simply to reduce common aspects of
the small perfunctory stylesheets to a single instance. Instead of
Xpointer, though, I use a PHP function that performs a transformation on
the collection-file which:
- adds the xsl version attribute (limited to 1.0 via libxslt right now)
- copies any namespace nodes from parent elements
- adds an xsl:import of a common.xsl file of frequently-used templates.


It does save plenty of space and clutter (especially routine
declarations like xmlns:xsl), and ensures I can rely on the common
templates being present in the collection's stylesheets. The
transformation that picks out the requested stylesheet is fairly simple;
it just takes in an "id" parameter and looks for the first child of the
root node that has the same ID. (I'm using a few literal-result element
stylesheets, so it's not limited to xsl:stylesheet children.) If
anyone's interested, I could post the stylesheet and the particular
collection I'm using, but we should split off the topic at that point.
~_^

~ Scott


-----Original Message-----
From: Abel Braaksma [mailto:abel.online@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 12:59 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  stylesheet expansion

Andrew Welch wrote:
> As Colin has said, compiled stylesheets seem to be the only way, but
> may be not what the OP was after.  Ideally importable compiled
> "stylesheet modules" will be invented soon....   :)

It really shouldn't be too hard to make a structure something like the
following, which is basically a simple collection framework for
stylesheets and can internally be gathered into a set of compiled
stylesheets:

<col:stylesheet-collection xmlns:col="http://stylesheet-collection"
start-with="main">

     <xsl:stylesheet col:name="main".... >
         <xsl:import href="#import-me" />
     </
     <xsl:stylesheet col:name="import-me">
          <xsl:output ... />
          <xsl:template match="...
     </

</col:stylesheet>

Or something like that. What catalogs are to XML and DTD, can stylesheet

collections be for XSLT. Perhaps a new standard ;)

Cheers,
-- Abel Braaksma