Standardizing stylesheets PIs (Was: Re: [docbook-apps] Current date?)

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Rune Enggaard Lausen wrote:

> If you are willing to rely on EXSLT support in the XSLT processor, you
>   could do like I did in our XSL-FO customization layer. It works with
> Saxon and xsltproc. Don't know about Xalan.

It brings interesting idea to me. What about adding support for some
timestamp PI into stylesheets. For example one could write something
like:

<pubdate><?dbtimestamp format="M-D-Y h:m:s"?></pubdate>

or

<releaseinfo>This document was generated at
<?dbtimestamp?></releaseinfo>

and stylesheet will take care of expanding <?dbtimestamp into correct
value according to format specifier. Placing timestamp into document is
commonly requested feature so it might be usefull to have it
standardized and don't force users to investigate their ad-hoc
solutions.

Norm what do you think about this idea?

It reminds me also another commonly requested feature. Although it is
not good from pure semantical point of view, one is time to time forced
to place manual line-break or page-break into document. Wouldn't be
reasonable to standardize PIs for this also? 

What other folks and stylesheet developers (I'm CCing this message)
think? I can take care of implementing these new PIs and also write some
documentaion which will summarize all PIs supported by stylesheets.

				Jirka		

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  Jirka Kosek  	                     
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