This came up during a recent Pandoc discussion. The discussion was about outputting <sectN> section styling when creating DocBook XML. Currently Pandoc outputs nested <section>s.

I argued you could easily change between the two formats and <section> is more flexible, so just leave Pandoc as it is. But it allowed me to play with XSLT once more. With the following results.

Translate to sectN⌗

This XSLT translates <section> to <sectN> where N is 5. If the sections are nested deeper it switches to <section>.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="section">
<xsl:variable name="i" select="count(ancestor::node())"/>
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="$i > 5">
            <section><xsl:apply-templates/></section>
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:element name="sect{$i}"><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:element>
        </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Translate to section And this translate <sectN> to <section>, this was slightly easier, as you don’t have to count anything.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="sect1 | sect2 | sect3 | sect4 | sect5">
    <section><xsl:apply-templates/></section>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>