[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] New/old pattern syntax, why can't we have both ?
There has already been a lot of criticism regarding the new "compact" XSL syntax for pattern matching. The main, and correct, argument being that as it doesn't conform to XML syntax. Personally I find the new syntax pleasing and much nicer to read and write that the old one but I also need to work on the patterns as if they were written in "real" XML. I think that the solution is very simple. The new syntax should be seen as a shorthand for the full, verbose, XML form. It would be the parser responsibility to translate the compact form into the normalised, "canonical" fully-XML form so that the application programmer can be oblivious of this syntax details. This is nothing new, RDF, for example has defined a compact and full format for its descriptions with a clear mapping between the two forms. I know that supporting two syntaxes would make parser writing slightly more complex but, as parsers gets written just once and then used billions of times, this is not really an issue. So my proposal would be: - define a canonical XML form for pattern matching - define a one-to-one mapping between the canonical form and the compact form - require any conforming XML/XSL parser to return the canonical form. -- Pasqualino "Titto" Assini --- assini@xxxxxxxx Kamus Internet Consulting --- http://www.kamus.it/ XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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