Bertrand wrote: > For me, the template author just wants to say "all <table> elements > must be copied with border=1 added", but he has no idea in > which order > the elements will appear in the source, and shouldn't have to care. > > Does your for-each syntax allow this? I think it requires declarative > rules, and if we're careful about how they are defined, they won't be > too scary and will add a lot of power. I've put my rules in a > separate > div on purpose, to make it clear that the template has a > "linear" part > and another "rules" section, and that the "rules" section works in a > different way than the rest. > > WDYT?
I like the idea - in fact I had the same idea myself, but without adding a special "rules" section. I'm not sure I see the point in keeping it in a special div? I think it's good to allow people to define templates anywhere in the template file ... that way you can take a "design dummy" page and simply annotate it with these attributes without having to rearrange it. Another thing it really should have is a way to declare global parameters, passed to it from the sitemap. The old stylesheet I posted the other day automatically declares parameters "id" and "random" because they were common requirements of our templates, but it would be better to have to declare them explicitly. e.g. <html template:parameters="foo bar baz"> I've done some work (not yet finished) on a similar transform to jxt, but without any pattern-matching templates so far (they're not impossible, just not quite so easy, because jxt doesn't already have pattern-matching templates). Cheers Con
