I am a novice in XSL, so my questions is rather about the methodology.

We want to design a system that prepares data in XML and expose it to the
end-user by means of internet browser. It seems that optimal solution is to
use  XSL for this purpose. We expect to have a lot of views. BUT... there
are a lot of professional HTML editors that allow HTML design and there is
a lot of experienced HTML designers. These designers are not programmers.
They are capable to design a perfect forms, colors, gifs etc. The business
content should be provided by mapping XML on this stuff (using XSL). It can
be done by separate person (a programmer). He needs to embed XSL to
existing HTML. Later HTML designer should be able to change page design
using his tools and programmer - to update XSL (in a convenient way). They
both are working on the same HTML page. In other words we would like to
have XSL document consisting of two parts: HTML template and some XSL tags
specifying where to put data from XML source. And we want to be able to
change these two parts independently.
I haven't seen a tool that allow to support such style of work. After
reading some materials introducing XSL technology I have discovered that
XSL is not exactly oriented on the proposed approach. The problem is that
XSL stylesheet that transforms XML into HTML can not be editable by an HTML
editor since XSL (in general) doesn't keep structure of the HTML template
unchanged.
There could be several solutions:
1. Use some subset of XSL allowing to keep structure of the HTML template
unchanged, e.g. use <xsl:for-each select="..."> instead of <xsl:template
match="...">. This can make it possible to edit XSL stylesheet by some HTML
editor which is able just to skip unknown tags (in our case tags started
with "xsl:"). (BTW, do you think it's possible?)
2. Wait for special HTML/XSL editors that will be able to restore HTML
structure from the XSL and edit HTML template in WYSIWYG mode. (When such
an editor could appear?)
3. Find out some other technology (not XSL) that is more applicable for the
described scenario. (Does anyone know such a technology?)

Thanks,
Alex



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