xsl:noop?

i currently have a whole lot of xsl:message statements in my stylesheets.
not near as powerful as printf(), but it is all we have for debugging.

in production i'd like to turn those off.

so then i'd have
<&DEBUG_MESSAGE_OPEN;> ... <&DEBUG_MESSAGE_CLOSE;>
instead of
<xsl:message> ... </xsl:message>

everywhere.
i'm not an sgml guru, so i can't seem to find a way to do this.
but even if i could do:
<!ENTITY DEBUG_MESSAGE_OPEN "xsl:noop">
then there is no xsl:noop to turn it into.

i guess the next step is to write a pre-processor in xslt which strips
xsl:message statements from xslt stylesheets....

it'd be nice if xslt processors had decent trace facilities (like perl -D),
and if xsl:message were actually reliable in execution semantics, and
if there were an easy way to turn it on and off. but no.
programming in xslt is about as much fun as programming in sh, in terms
of sophistication of the dev tools.

btw -- still looking for an answer to my query of saturday 2/5,
subject "no way to avoid errors if getting both strings and elements?"

thanks.

-mda



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