Hi Tiffany,

> the "stand-alone component" could be xml, htm/html, shtml file.

There's no way for XSLT 1.0 to read a document that isn't at least a
well-formed XML entity. HTML files typically aren't well-formed XML
entities.

> currently, the way i "include" a "stand-alone component" is with
> hardcoding. for example:
>
>         <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><!--#include
> virtual= "/public/includes/about_side_nav.htm" --></xsl:text>

Presumably the result of your XSLT transformation then gets processed
by some other server-side process, then.

> OR
>
> <xsl:value-of select="/folder name/component name" /> 

I don't understand how this would work at all.

> 1. is there a cool way of combining the output from separate xsl
> files into one browser window?

It depends on how you've structured your XSLT stylesheets, but if they
all use templates with different modes, then you can do something
like:

<!-- A.xsl contains templates with mode="A" -->
<xsl:include href="A.xsl" />
<!-- B.xsl contains templates with mode="B" -->
<xsl:include href="B.xsl" />

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="A" />
  <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="B" />
</xsl:template>

to get a result that combines the result of processing with A.xsl and
B.xsl.

> 2. can you recommend an approach to a dynamic solution for
> "includes"?

I'm still not sure what you mean by "includes", and now I'm not sure
what you mean by a "dynamic solution". A small example would really
help.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/