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Re: multiple stylesheet for an XML file

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Richard Lander wrote:

> I've got an idea. Why not make your default stylesheet a really short one
> that displays a HTML forms pulldown-menu or scroll-box that displays the
> available stylesheets. I'm not sure off-hand if IE5-XSL can pick out

I see one problem with this otherwise very neat idea: can it be done in a browser-independant way? After all, your HTML pulldown menu will eventually have to resort to some kind of event handler as a reaction to the user's choice that tells the browser to
reformat the current XML document from which this HTML was generated with a new XSL stylesheet.

As far as I can see, this can be done in IE5 using DOM scripting, but will this be something that is supported by all interactive applications of XSL in a compatible manner (e.g. Netscape 5)? In other words, the menu you propose would eventually have to hold
some kind of "onclick" handler on the menu item for a certain stylesheet - what is the code to be put into that attribute that makes things work equally well in all XSL implementations?

A similar use case would be the reapplication of the *same* stylesheet in response to user input, just with different top-level parameters passed to the stylesheet. A typical application could be an XSL-generated list from an XML document that can be re-sorted
at the user's request, similar to Microsoft's Stock Quotes example, which still uses some IE5-specific scripting as "glue" code.

Is this an indication that an intrinsic XSL event handling mechanism would be a good thing to design, either in conjunction with XSL-generated HTML, or as a feature in Formatting Objects that allows for true interactivity? (This somehow reminds me of the
DOM-scripting vs. XSL debate we had a while ago...)

ciao marcus


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