Hi Norman,

I must admit I don't fully understand your point here. I don't understand at all why you say "that's not so bad, but it's ugly." Actually, I even think this could be better...

First the PI thing to check that the main processing has been setuped as expected sounds rather convoluted to me. But that's about aesthetics and it is not so important as that should work at the first glance.

More important is that you try to hide the processing architecture when it would be instead interesting for the customization layer. If the Docbook stylesheets need to use several passes, maybe the user could want to benefit from thoses passes. It could want to translate an extension to plain Docbook elements in the "normalization" pass, and to deal another extension in the normalized document.

So it would maybe be more interesting to document accurately the several passes and say to the biginner "just put your template rules into the mode db:xxx."

But maybe I just didn't understand the problem?

Regards,

--drkm

Yes, perhaps the problem is less significant that it felt at first. I'll poke at it a bit before I commit. :-)