xml-dev - designing the XSLT

["Raheja, Dhruv (TRANS)" <Dhruv.Raheja@Trans.ge.com>]

hi,
     i have prepared the DTD and XML for my application. i am having some
problems deciding how to structure the XSL  and i'm hoping someone will be
able to guide me. my  design objective for the XSL doc is that it should be
a generic doc that i can apply to applications (in my case i'm trying to
design tech manuals using XML) that have the same make-up or XML/DTD
heirarchy. i guess to make things easy for the time being i could design the
XSL in such a way that it suits my prototype document but it would obviously
be more beneficial if i could design a generic XSL that would cater to all
the manuals that are are authored using XML. on similar lines, i have
designed a more-or-less "generic" DTD and XML. the basic problem is that my
DTD is rather loosely structured just so that it can be applied to any
similar XML document.  e.g. i have the declaration:

<!ELEMENT activity (schematic | outline | text_description |
visual_description | procedure | note | warning | caution)*>

as you can see, any element can pretty much appear in any order and any
number of times. e.g.  i could have  <visual_description> before a
<procedure>  or  say before a  <text_description> and i could have multiple
ocurrences of <visual_description>. the case is the same with <note>,
<warning>, <caution> etc. 

this is causing a problem to me when i try and design/conceptualize a
generic XSL because although the elements could be the same for all XML
docs, their order/inclusion could be different for each doc. how do i
overcome this problem? what functionality of XSL (e.g. commands) would be
best for designing such an XSL doc? 

i am really hoping someone will be able to help me with this.

thanks a lot,
Dhruv  

 Dhruv Raheja
Summer Intern (Documentation Center)
GE Transportation Systems
2901 East Lake Road
Erie, PA 16531
Ph : (814) 875 - 2529 (O)
       (814) 824 - 2888 (R)