I'll catch this one myself -- XT has
a lot more functionality than the last time I looked 
at it.  XT seems to have more than just
a command-line interface and might even
let you assign DOMs to variables.

I hope that IBM, Oracle, Microsoft,
and other XSLT implementors are paying
attention.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Terris" <terris@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 1999 10:57 AM
Subject: Attention XSLT API writers


> XSLT APIs should provide the ability to set XSLT
> variables before processing a stylesheet.  XT
> provides this.  However, XT is a command-line
> program.  In order for a web site to exhibit
> decent response time, command-line
> programs must be avoided.
> 
> Furthermore, you may want to set assign a large
> amount of data to a variable.  
> You might even want to assign a DOM to a
> variable. Assigning a DOM would give 
> better performance than assigning a string 
> because you just might already have a DOM handy.
> An extra parse can be avoided, which could
> make a big difference when dealing with large
> documents.
> 
> A specific need for this is the case of merging
> or appending two XML documents.  document() is
> a useful function as long as your
> XML is accessible by a URL.  As XML development
> matures, XML will be derived from databases
> and APIs more and more.  With today's XSLT spec, the
> only way to merge two documents without
> at least one document being accessible by
> a URL is to modify the stylesheet first.  As 
> someone who has real experience with modifying
> stylesheets on the fly in order to merge documents, 
> I can tell you that:
> 
> (a) The concept is confusing
> (b) It's overly cumbersome
> (c) It's slow
> 
> If there is ever a push for a standard interface like the DOM
> for XPATH and XSLT, and I can tell you that we
> needed one about a month ago, I certainly hope that
> the API enables variable assignment before
> the stylesheet is processed.
> 
> Thank you,
> Terris
> 


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