I have a small webspace where I store a xsl-file and a xml-file:

http://members.chello.se/spelbetyg/blog.xml

which is transformed by

http://members.chello.se/spelbetyg/blog.xsl

What I would like to do is to add a function to change the sort order of the blog posts.

Is there any way I can pass parameters with the request so that I can change the <xsl:sort> to sort by ascending or descending depending on the request parameter.

Since my server does not allow server scripting I have to solve this problem on the client-side.

I know this can be done by using javascript, but I would like to see a XSLT solution.

Please help.

As far as I know this can't be done. XSLT has no standard provision for external input from a querystring. What browsers are you targetting?

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Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

I would like it to work with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Well I'm no expert with Firefox but you cannot do it directly with IE. You would need a html page that scripted the transformation on the client after reading the querystring.

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Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

You need to write an HTML page containing JavaScript to invoke the transformation. Sarissa provides a transformation API that works with both IE and Firefox.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

I see that it's out of range for a stylesheet to import request parameters, but wouldn't it be nice to have

<xsl:stylesheet ...
<xsl:param name="arg1"/>
...

and that $arg1 contains the value of blaha.xml?arg1= in the request row?

I think XSLT has potential on the client-side. Passing params from request-row would increase the use of client-side XSLT a lot.

mhkay: "an HTML page containing JavaScript to invoke the transformation"

And that is exactly what I would not like to do. Client-side Javascript produces a security warning from the browsers telling you that the code could be harmful. Otherwise, I would have used Javascript's capabilities and document.write(); instead of XSLT.