If you are using a framework like Apache’s Cocoon, that allows XSLT transforms to be referenced as the product of another pipeline then that’s one way to employ meta-stylesheets. Another and potentially more interesting approach, which I’m sure Mr. Kay will bring-up, is the use of the Saxon 8 / XSLT 2 extension functions saxon:compile-transform() and saxon:transform(). These two together allow you to load a stylesheet into your running stylesheet and apply it to a node-set or sequence that you are working on.

But why stop there when you could build a transform at run-time based on some aspect of your source document then apply that transform to either the source or some node-set derived from the source to produce the desired result.

All very wonderful stuff and I’d love to be there when he presents his paper but alas I will not. So I hope it will be available post conference.

I initially used XSLT transforms on XSLT stylesheets to map some XHTML generating XSLT into XSL-FO generating XSLT. The end result of that was to simplify the maintenance of a website that published to both XHTML and PDF. Structure and style changes to the XHTML where propagated to the PDF output automatically… Sweet

All I see is an Abstract.