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FW: How is this part of the XSLT specification to be interpreted?


> Thorbjørn,
> 
> I think you make a very good point about allowing 
> documentation in XSLT
> stylesheets, and particularly structured documentation within 
> templates.

Agreed.  Especially since XSLT is a very compact language, it 
is very important to be able to provide good documentation.

> It might be that XSLT processors will start providing this as 
> an extension
> elements or attributes of some kind, or that it is included 
> in XSLT 2.0
> whenever that comes along.  Thinking aloud, a possibility 
> would be to have
> the 'result-prefix' attribute of xsl:namespace-alias take a 
> special value
> ('#ignore') for elements that should not be included in the output.

Is there anybody around here with a voice in w3c, who can 
raise this issue to them?  

It appears to me that the current 19991116 version of XSLT is 
completely frozen and that there is quite some time before 
any new updates to the XSLT specifications.  Is this notion 
generally shared?
 
> At the moment, though, you could take advantage of the fact 
> that top-level
> elements that are not within the XSLT namespace are ignored.  
> Given your
> example, you can currently legally do:
> 
> <doc:test>Hallo</doc:test>
> <xsl:template match="TOC">
>   <rowset>
>     <xsl:apply-templates/>
>   </rowset>
> </xsl:template>
> 
>This will probably be sufficient for most small templates - 
>it is the
> larger ones that require more internal documentation.
> 
> I hope that helps,

Your suggestion is exactly what Norman Walsh is already 
tentatively doing with the DocBook XSL style sheets which 
apparently is the best that is possible at the moment without 
creating a derived style sheet for actual processing, and 
which is what I would like to avoid at all costs, since it 
moves the documentation too far away from what it documents.

I believe that with XML-based programs, we have an excellent 
opportunity to create languages with all the benefits of 
Knuth's Literate Programing paradigm without the traditional 
disadvantages, since the programmers are well accustomed to 
the notion of converting documents to have another view of 
them.  Especially since XSLT "feels" to me like a functional 
language providing a lot of small building blocks, I think 
that the idea of building named "chunks" of programs, which 
can then be used at will elsewhere, combined with the notion 
that the program is just an embedded part of the 
documentation, would prove extremely beneficial here. 

Best regards,

Thorbjørn


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