document() for non-XML documents

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The document() function allows me to merge multiple XML input documents.
However, what if I need to merge text and HTML documents (and possibly
other formats) into my output documents? Is there some way to do this?

The specific use-case I'm encountering is the XML notes for a presentation
on XSL itself. A slide may contain an XML document. This is
straight-forward like this:

  <include href="compositions.xml"/>

The style sheet replaces the <include> element with the named XML document
compositions.xml. This also works for inserting an XSL style sheet into the
output since XSL style sheets are well-formed XML document.

However, suppose I want to insert the contents of a simple text file:

  <include href="compositions.txt"/>

In this case document() doesn't succeed because compositions.txt is not
well-formed HTML.

A slightly more complicated case: suppose I want to insert the contents of
a non-well-formed HTML file:

  <include href="compositions.html"/>

It seems to me there should be a way to do this, though perhaps this is the
province of the as-yet-unimplemented XLink spec.


+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|                  The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999)                   |
|              http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/               |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764532367/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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