XSL companion, The

Fragmented stylesheets

The term 'stylesheet' implies a continuous 'sheet', represented by a single data file containing the Stylesheet or Transform element, and all the templates and other instructions. Indeed, this will often be the case, particularly for simple stylesheets. However, it is possible for a stylesheet to be pulled apart and divided into a number of separate data files. One reason for doing this is to make a huge stylesheet easier to manage and edit. A much better reason, though, is to make it possible to share parts of a stylesheet with other stylesheets. For example, an organization may create three stylesheets to format a series of books in three different ways (for different audiences or publishing media) yet discover that some ...