[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Note from XSL WG on Extension Concerns
[Thanks to Steve for posting an update on the status of the XSL WG] I thought I'd invite a little discussion, and jot down some of the notes I've been making on this topic. Obviously they'll have to be taken in light of Steve's comments. Namespaces: Obviously there will be a need to standardise on one or more namespaces for extension functions. I'd suggest that for Java based extensions one of two options should be considered: - Java/Sun Namespace e.g. java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/...classname... - W3C Java Namespace e.g. www.w3.org/XSLT/1999/Transform/Java/...classname... (Personally I prefer the former.) Language Binding: Of the two XSLT processors I've had chance to look at (Xalan and XT), the basic language bindings are largely similar. Java int, long, etc are mapped to XSLT number; similarly for boolean and String. As far as result set fragments and node-sets are concerned there's a difference. XT uses its own bindings, Xalan uses the DOM API (i.e. Document Fragment and NodeList). The latter seems a sensible choice for standardisation, as otherwise a DOM-a-like API will be required. This seems to be the accepted process - each spec usually supplies or defines a customised DOM version. I can envisage that there are other features that an XSLT processor might expose - such as access to in-scope variable bindings; exposing XPath querying; and possibly even document parsing functions. The latter would be useful if I was (for example) writing an document() (see section 12.1 in spec) extension function which retrieved documents using a non-standard mechanism, e.g. secure HTTP, whatever. Having downloaded the relevant document it'd have to be parsed into a suitable node-set for use by the processor. This requires the ability to allow the XSLT processor to parse a secondary document. These additional API functions could also form the basis for a standardised XSLT processor API. Standardised Extentsion: The recent discussions highlighted two potential extensions ripe for either adding to the XSLT core, or standardising in some way. These are: - multiple outputs - result-set-fragment to node-set 'casts' I assume that a revised XSLT spec would dictate the signature of these methods, and expected processing but not provide an implementation. Also presumably these would fall under the normal XSLT namespace. It will be interesting to see the next version of XSLT take shape. Thanks to the WG for taking notice of the community concerns. Cheers, L. *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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