Re: JAR protocol for URL in xsl:import

On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, David Tolpin wrote:

> > Then one could author something like
> > 
> >    <xsl:import "JAR:foo/bar.xsl"/>
> > 
> > And it would work. I can't recall if there is a protocol for JAR
> > references, but I suspect there isn't.
> 
> Having a protocol for Java resources would be useful instead. Internally, RenderX XEP
> uses 'resource:' as the protocol (resource:com/renderx/util/magic.xml is a Java resource
> with the correspoding  name). I doubt though it  can be promoted as a general feature
> since XSL should not be language-bound.

You're right, that would be better, since the external stylesheet would be
picked up as long as it was in the CLASSPATH, whether contained in a JAR or
part of the filesystem.

Of course, as has been pointed out, whether one uses a 'jar' URL protocol,
or an extension that supports Java resource look-ups, the resulting XSL is
no longer portable to non-Java implementations.

I wonder if a more portable approach to the same problem would be to allow
applications that call transformers to specify URL resolvers, in the way
that callers of an XML parser can specify an entity resolver. This would
allow an application to trap "universal" names and return local copies
extracted from within the application's JAR. 

// Gregory Murphy <Gregory.Murphy@xxxxxxx>
// Software Engineer
// Customer Network Platform, Sun Microsystems


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