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Re: Namespaces Not Necessarily Unrepentant Evil

• From: matt@v...
• To: papresco@t...
• Date: 28 Aug 1998 00:28:46 -0700
• Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 00:28:46 -0700 (PDT)

> 
> > >Again, my apologies to those who I badgered inappropriately.
> > 
> > Not required. -Tim
> 
> Aren't we a cosy little family. I'm glad to take humility from Eliot
> whenever I can get it.

He's a shining example for us all to look up to ;-)

> XSL:
> 
> Does the XSL transformation language help?
> 
> I believe that given our current level of knowledge, the XSL
> transformation language goes too far the *other* way. Nobody currently
> knows how to verify that a document that conforms to a DTD A will conform
> to a DTD B after going through an XSL transformation without doing the
> transformation. This means that authors who use XSL transformations to get
> to industry standard DTDs must constantly do the transformation to check
> that they still conform. This is unacceptable for solving the problem I
> described. In this context, XSL is a gun aimed at the foot. 
> 
> If someone wants to sponsor 3 months of research, I will be happy to
> develop algorithms that can predict whether an input document will conform
> to an output DTD after an XSL transformation, without doing the
> transformation (as long as XSL doesn't get more complex in the meantime!).

Paul, you know very well that this is generally an unsolveable
problem.  I haven't had a chance to read the latest XSL spec, but
unless the programatic aspects have been considerably reduced, I think
you'll be disappointed at the end of the 3 months - no matter how
brilliant (and Paul is brilliant) you are.  Of course, if they have
made those changes, then you might have success in 3 months, but then
XSL will fail for the general formatting problem.

Matthew

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