[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Compile a transformation description into a largenumber of
On Thu, 2018-12-20 at 15:50 +0000, Costello, Roger L. wrote: > Is there some small set of very simple operations that, when > combined, can translate any XML vocabulary to another? What you describe is very similar in principle to the bytecode that Michael Kay has described as being used in the Saxon product. > . Possibly the "transformation description" box shown above could be > much more declarative than, say, a full-fledged XSLT program that > transforms vocabulary 1 to vocabulary 2. i am not sure about declarative programming on a spectrum, from "not declarative" through "suggests being declarative" through "maybe slightly declarative" all the way to "wonderfully declarative"? > Have you thought of such things? Is there a small subset of very > simple XSLT operations that can perform any transformation? Stated > another way, is there a small subset of very simple XSLT operations > that is "Turing Complete"? Have you ever created a compiler to output > a large number of these very simple transform operations? i've done it in other areas. You can end up with something like, assembly code though, which is very far from high level. If you go for something higher level, you end up with XSLT. If you want something higher level than XSLT, you either end up with something like XQuery (which isn't really higher level at all) or something specialized and not generally applicable, or less powerful. For example, you could write a language that said things like, element para becomes p element title becomes h2 element title within document/metadata becomes title within html/head if all you had to do was rename elements and move some about. But now suppose you need to add a total to the order table, add a class="negative" attribute to all transaction values that are negative, make mentions of other chapters be links, split the input into a separate HTML file per chapter with a table of contents... and you quickly need something more general-purpose, so you're either back to XSLT, or your higher-level language gets extended, element qv becomes a link to the corresponding target with the generated code using the XML Schema to work out which attribute to use to find the target, perhaps. I don't know how much mileage there is in this. Maybe it'd end up replicating the immense, detailed, careful and productive work that the XSLT Working Group did over the past twenty years. If you made a language that was high-level enough that the same input description might work for HTML, JSON, JSON-LD, XML, RDF, then there might be some interest. But that's quite a challenge, especially given that you need the language to be usable by people other than its designer ;) Liam -- Liam Quin, https://www.holoweb.net/liam/ Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/ XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training & consulting.
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