Q: Approaches to generating a table of contents?

[I'll post this here before cross-posting to XML-L.  This has also been
posted to comp.text.xml.]

I am moving some documentation into XML from HTML.  It makes a lot of
sense, for reasons I won't go into here.

For publishing, my thought had been to use an XSL processor to generate
HTML, and for the most part I haven't encountered any major stumbling
blocks but one:

I would really like to be able to generate a simple (i.e. non-hierarchical)
table of contents from the XML structure, but I'm having a devil of a time
figuring out a straightforward way of doing it.

It looks like one way to have done this was with modes, but that's
currently not in XSL (although under discussion, it seems).

Or would this be done in the formatting objects side of XSL (which I
confess I don't fully understand and in fact isn't supported by XT, which
is what I'm using)?

Am I trying to use XSL before it'sf fully cooked?

In that case, alternatively, it appears this could be done before XSL
processing with an XML processing instruction.  I guess I would need to
write a table-of-contents PI for XP, if that's what I continue to use.  Or
is there an XML processor that already has such a thing?

Much thanks for any tips, pointers, etc.

Denis Haskin



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