This falls in the general category of "toolability" questions...
I may be misremembering, but I believe Xalan's internal representation of
stylesheets is just that -- internal, not intended to be an API, and while
it starts as an abstract syntax tree the emphasis is on _abstract_; it may
not map directly to the source syntax, especially as we begin doing
optmizations like common subexpression elimination.
We've put some work into being able to tell a tool what part of the
stylesheet is executing, but I seem to remember that this is reported as
line/column of the source text.
So: I don't think we're expecting or supporting attempts to directly build
or alter a stylesheet model. I'm not sure we want to, given the fact that
it would hamstring optimization attempts. I lean toward saying that a good
stylesheet editor is a separate tool with its own set of trade-offs.
______________________________________
Joe Kesselman, IBM Next-Generation Web Technologies: XML, XSL and more.
"The world changed profoundly and unpredictably the day Tim Berners Lee
got bitten by a radioactive spider." -- Rafe Culpin, in r.m.filk
