Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: variable import hrefs?

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Mark Johnson <mark@phy.duke.edu> was heard to say:
| I want it all. Everything. Now.

You can't have everything, where would you put it?

| Despite the dopey story line, I'm quite serious. This issue is bound
| to arise again and again in different settings. 

Bleh. I see your point. Well, I don't have a good answer now, and I
may never have a good answer for XT, but if you can get Norma to switch
to a recent Xalan or Saxon (or any other processor that supports the jaxp
URIResolver), she'll be able to use a catalog to redirect

  <xsl:import href="http://.../html/docbook.xsl"/>

to version 1.24.

| Then:
| 
|   the user's $HOME/.catalog could tell the parser to look at whatever
|   version the user wanted it to point to.
| 
| Cool, eh?

Yes, that's basically my plan. After I get the catalog stuff distributed,
I'll probably change all my dorky relative system identifiers to something
reasonably global and use a catalog to do the right thing.

(Whether or not I decide to be somewhat mean and use URNs for my system
identifiers is an open question. But I very much doubt I will, despite
a certain nasty temptation.)

| But hey, I'm no expert. For all I know, what I'm asking for could be
| 
| (a.) already in the works

Yes.

| (b.) ridiculous, unseemly

Nope.

| (c.) already solved, (my ignorance is the problem)

Not really.

| (d.) profound, insightful, visionary
| 
| I hope it's (d.), but I doubt it.

Close enough. It's certainly a significant, real problem that needs
to be solved. (I encourage everyone to send mail to the xslt-comments@w3.org
list asking why the xsl:import and xsl:include elements don't support
both a 'publicid' and 'href' attributes :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Men are more like the times they
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | live in than they are like their
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | fathers.--Ali Ibn-abi-talib