Embedded Documentation

Hello,
I'm working on a scheme to embed documentation for global parameters within a
stylesheet. The purpose of this to provide additional information that another
stylesheet can use in order to automatically generate an HTML form.

I've worked out an approach, and would welcome comments on whether this is
proper, as well as suggestions on better ways to accomplish the same thing.

from the spec...
2.1 XSLT Namespace (paragraph 2)
An element from the XSLT namespace may have any attribute not from the XSLT
namespace, provided that the expanded name of the attribute has a non-null
namespace URI. The presence of such attributes must not change the behavior of
XSLT elements and functions defined in this document. Thus, an XSLT processor
is always free to ignore such attributes, and must ignore such attributes
without giving an error if it does not recognize the namespace URI. Such
attributes can provide, for example, unique identifiers, optimization hints, or
documentation.

So here I would define a new namespace and use a set of attributes to describe
the parameter, such as:
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/XSL/Transform/1.0">
<xsl:param name="fsize" xmlns:pd="" pd:type="font-size">12</xsl:param>

<xsl:template match="/">
  <test> <xsl:value-of select="$fsize"/> </test>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Now would it be proper to bind the 'pd' namespace to another XML file that
contains a description of 'font-size'? I could then get a full description of
the 'font-size' type and use that to build a proper form element for changing
the value of this parameter. I could also have a set of different types defined
in different files and have each one bound to a different namespace.

One problem with this is that each <xsl:param> has to have the namespace
declaration. If I move the namespace declaration up to the <xsl:stylesheet>
element, then the result elements end up inheriting this declaration, which I
don't want to happen. For example:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/XSL/Transform/1.0" xmlns:pd="">
<xsl:param name="fsize" pd:type="font-size">12</xsl:param>

<xsl:template match="/">
  <test> <xsl:value-of select="$fsize"/> </test>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

yeilds:
<test xmlns:pd="">12</test>

Thanks,
Dan Machak

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