Re: Crazy idea: loopback namespace

> 1) Verbose call template syntax 
yes, could you explain your original loopback idea (I didn't understand
it and then the thread wandered off topic:-)

>  Very verbose IF syntax. I really wish we had a ternary operator
you mean the following stylesheet design pattern.

a) write select expression for the simple case.
b) find for more general case need an if.
   Curse. Break out the query into an xsl:if expression.
c) Find that for full generality you need an else clause.
   Curse again. Change xsl:if to xsl:when, and wrap in xsl:choose.

Of course I have never been through these steps, as I always fully
specify my stylesheets before starting to code. Honestly:-)

3) No ability to generate intermediate XML and apply style rules to it.

xt (or saxon) node-set gives you that, doesn't it?
but it would be good to get it pushed back into the standard or at least
into an agreed common extension namespace if only to avoid nested
fallback coding of essentially the same functionality.

4) URLEncode should be a built-in
In theory you are not supposed to need that if writing to XML, as an XML
application is supposed to do any needed encoding as it passes the url
to the url system.
  <p>An XML processor should handle a non-ASCII character in a URI by
  representing the character in UTF-8 as one or more bytes, and then 
  escaping these bytes with the URI escaping mechanism (i.e., by
  converting each byte to %HH, where HH is the hexadecimal notation of the
  byte value).</p>

5) Need a GROUP BY operator.
Yes I suspect so.

David


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