xml-dev - RE: XLink transformations

[Steve Boyce <SteveB@hbs.com>]

I'm very much a beginner in the XML world, so please be patient if I'm
talking rubbish. Anyway, this discussion prompts me to put my head above the
parapet because it relates to some things I already didn't understand. 

This is: How is XLink anything other that a particular instance of XSLT?
That is to say, if I have a schema S then Xlink is a transformation to a
"linked schema" S' (S' will be a member of a set of all the possible linked
schemas of S, if you see what I mean).  Wouldn't it be better to try and
work in these terms?

And this relates very obviously to a (mis)understanding I have about
XSL/XSLT.  Don't these "secretly" presuppose that they are mapping from one
schema to another schema?  I mean, if I write a stylesheet, in reality I
have in mind a source and destination schema.  Shouldn't these be made
explicit?

These comments / questions relate to the present discussion as follows.  It
looks to be about transforming a stylesheet on S (i.e. a transformation from
S to (X)HTML) into a stylesheet on a "linked schema" S'.  And this looks
like it might be hard, because in general if I have two transformations on
S, it's not obvious to me that there's any meaningful general way to apply
them consecutively.

OK so I probably just demonstrated my complete ignorance but I wanted to
ask, not least because the question cuts across a lot of things I'm trying
to get my head round...

Thanks - Steve