>> Fortunately, using the wonders of XSL (specifically, XSLT) you can have
>> the browser transform the raw XML into a pretty-looking XHTML document.
>>
>> But *only* if you edit the original XML file to mention the XSLT file
>> that you want to apply.
>
> Why does this come as such a surprise to you?
>
> Remember that the same thing is common practice for HTML and CSS as
> well: If you want the HTML to be rendered using a particular style
> sheet, you'll usually specify that in the HTML header.

Well, what you say is of course true.

Then again, CSS just applies a few font settings to an HTML file. XSL 
transforms one file into a totally different one. If every single time 
you open that file you're always going to apply the same transformation, 
you might as well just not bother keeping the original file, and only 
store the transformed version. It completely defeats the whole purpose 
of XSL.

Actually, no, that's not /completely/ true. If several files all use the 
same XSL, then changing that one XSL file immediately changes /all/ of 
the files that use it.

Even so, XSL is clearly crying out for the ability to apply more than 
one XSL file to the same source file. And indeed you can trivially do 
that - just not with a web browser, unfortunately.

> I'm not sure whether all modern browsers support client-supplied CSS,
> but I wouldn't be surprised if there were still some out there that
> don't. For instance I have no idea how to choose a custom CSS in
> Firefox; you can disable all CSS, or choose which of multiple
> server-supplied CSS to use, but that seems to be about it.

I only recently discovered that Firefox even has a UI for changing the 
CSS. ;-) (Or turning it off, for that matter.) I have no idea whether 
you can supply your own CSS; isn't that an optional feature of the spec? 
There's probably a way to do it, but there might not be a UI. (E.g., 
there may be something hidden in about:config somewhere.)

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