Well. We've already had some comments with regard to the difficulty and 
inadvisability of messing with the source tree (I assume from the stand point 
of XSL, at least.) These comments have made sense to me.

On the other hand, I can sure see the utility of assembling pieces of multiple, 
similarly structured documents, e.g., synopsis piece, author info, publication 
date, version, etc., into a unit that is then processed via XSL for 
presentation, with links, perhaps. But I wouldn't think it appropriate that 
this assembly process be done by XSL. It seems more of a mainstream query 
function that deserves its own, optimized tools.

In general, I'm a bit puzzled about the best way of thinking about concurrently 
handling multiple documents in the context of DOM, SAX, XSL. Some work on this 
seems to be the MDSAX kit from JXML but I haven't looked at it in detail.

Another approach, I presume, it to store the documents, either as indexed 
fragments a la POET or as parsed trees a la eXcelon. No free joy on this front 
however.

Any other ideas or comments?	

(Perhaps this isn't appropriate for the XSL list, although multiple documents 
and changing the source tree do seem to recur as themes.)

	...edN


-----Original Message-----
From:	Borden, Jonathan [SMTP:jborden@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent:	Saturday, January 16, 1999 12:37 PM
To:	xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:	RE: Feature Request: equivalent to DSSSL read-entity function

Let me add to this,

what would be even better would be the ability to inject this external
entity into the *source* XML tree for processing. This would allow the
important ability to merge several XML documents together into an output
document.

Currently, this is done by pre-processing the XML documents into a merged
document.

Jonathan Borden
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net

> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of G. Ken Holman
> Subject: Feature Request: equivalent to DSSSL read-entity function
>
>
> In my training materials I would like to inject the text string equivalent
> of the contents of an external file.  By "text string
> equivalent", I expect
> the read function to translate characters matching the built-in entities
> into entity references.


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