[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XSLT and URI processing
I mentioned earlier that XML Base is in some ways a transformation, and that XSLT 2.0 appears to have heard of it. I'm wondering now about a fairly simple situation. I have a group of XHTML documents, let's say, and they all use relative URIs to represent the links among themselves and links to resources (like images) they use. They also use some absolute URIs and relative URIs using HTML base or xml:base attributes to represent links to external information. I want to archive them such that their location is absolutized, pinned to a particular permanent home (which might, for instance, include date information). To do this, I'd like to build an XSLT stylesheet. As part of that stylesheet's work, I'd like to transform the relative URIs which represent the original set of documents to MY absolute URI, while preserving existing absolute URIs and honoring the intent of the xml:base or html:base claims made in the originals. However, XSLT and XPath appear to lack anything like an "absolutize" function. I don't see any clear path forward for this in the context of XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0, nor do my preliminary explorations of the 2.0 versions offer me much more hope on this issue. Overall, I'm looking for a function that: takes a URI as an argument IF the URI is absolute, it returns the same URI IF the URI is relative, it absolutizes it, based on: a) xml:base if available or b) the base URI of the document (or external entity) itself or c) a provided base URI (b) would be for archiving information more or less in-place, while (c) would be for archiving the information at a different location. (a), (b) and (c) might well be represented as separate functions. EXSLT doesn't (yet) have such a function, though I understand that a pair of extension functions can make this work in 4XSLT. Given the status of XML Base as a W3C Recommendation, I have to admit that this feels like a surprising omission from at least the latest of these specs. The information I can find about URIs in XSLT and XPath seems mostly aimed at retrieving information (like documents) from within implementations, not at processing URIs directly. Given the regularity with which URIs cause trouble for this community, that seems like something worth discussion. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com
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