alternative to repeatedly walking the ancestor axis in

I wonder if there are any cunning solutions to this problem:

- An attribute which indicates right-to-left text can occur on any
element in the input
- All elements in the output beneath that element should then have a
certain style

For example:

<foo>
  <bar dir="rtl">
    <baz>...

The output for both bar and baz should contain the style.

Using 2.0 I guess the solution would be tunnelled paramters, but in
1.0 you'd have to manually pass the parameters - which isn't
practical...  which leaves walking the ancestor axis most of the time
checking for the dir attribute.

Are there any other ways?   Or is walking the ancestor axis no big
deal, especially when the input tree is likely to be a DOM?


-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/