Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Conditional Transformation with XSL

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Ali Saffari <asaffari@pironet.com> was heard to say:
| We are planing to use DocBook for our userdocumentation. For this
| purpose we need to generate different kinds of documentation for online
| and print media. Several chapters, sections, imageobjects should only
| appear on online media or only on print media.
| 
| We decided to use the "arch" attribute for this kind of separation.

That's fair. I probably would have chosen the less semantically 
loaded "condition" myself.

[...]
| As you can see it for the para-template, I've taken the definition from 
| the html-styleshhet and wrapped it with a <xsl:if ...> tag. Now I got
| two
| questions:
| 
| General Question:
| 
| Is this the right way for doing this kind of customization? I am not
| very
| happy about the fact that i've copied the content of the original
| template
| in my own template ad just added the <xsl:if ...>. Is there any way to 
| prevent this, so don't have to check my templates every time a new
| release
| of the stylesheets are available?

Yes, use apply-imports:

<xsl:stylesheet ...>
<xsl:import href="/path/to/docbook/html/docbook.xsl"/>

<xsl:template match="para">
  <xsl:if test="@arch='online' or not(@arch)">
    <xsl:apply-imports/>
  </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

You'll have to be a little carefull with para, because it appears in
several modes and with a few predicates, but that's the basic style
you're after.

| This stuff works well with tags like para, table, imageobject, admons
| and so on but if do this the same way for <chapter>, <sect1>, <sect2>
| or other section-like tags, I get corrupt output!! Some of the chunked
| files are missing!!! Does anybody knows what I am doing wrong here?

Things will (probably) work better with apply-imports, but you might
end up needing to do more work with your own custom version of the
chunking stylesheet.

| So what is the difference between these tags? How can I solve this
| problem? Please help me!

Note that chunk.xsl already overrides some of them...

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | The stone fell on the pitcher? Woe
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | to the pitcher. The pitcher fell
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | on the stone? Woe to the
                                   | pitcher.--Rabbinic Saying