On 23 Aug 2014, at 4:49 am, Sean Allred <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > And I don't mean to advocate that these objects should be able to have > many (9+) mandatory arguments; I'm far more concerned with the > homelessness for optional ones. I think after Frank’s experiments with sectioning, it became apparent that this was a major stumbling block. When a chapter heading can have 1. title 2. toc title 3. header title 4. label 5. unnumbered flag 6. author 7. epigraph … it no longer makes sense to require mandatory arguments. On the other hand I do see Joseph’s point that when you have just one or two actually mandatory arguments that writing the following is a bit ugly: \UseInstance{crossref}{latex2e}{ label = #1 }% only one mandatory argument * * * A model that I think has worked quite well in the LaTeX world is how BibTeX has a notion of “mandatory” and “optional” fields for bibliography references. Perhaps we could supplement the current xtemplate interface with a keyval-type-argument (one only per interface, of course), in which the optional/mandatory nature of each keyval item within is specified by the document design (and some may well be always mandatory). So according to the situation you could have either \UseInstance{…}{…}{arg one}{arg two}{arg three} or \UseInstance{…}{…}{ arg-one=… , arg-two=…, arg-three=… } or even a combination of the two: \UseInstance{…}{…}{arg one}{ arg-two=…, arg-three=… } Any thoughts? Will