Re: Simple API for XSL?

> It seems to me that an XSL processor is just a SAX filter that takes a
> stylesheet as an argument. The "simple API for XSL" is the SAX filter API.

But there is still a need to reuse the XSL matching engine as
a query API, a standard error reporting and debugging API besides
just XML errors (like malformed template expressions), and 
a standard way to retrieve the results of processing
(a DOM tree or an OutputStream stream)

Whether or not this API is plugged in as a filter on top of
SAX is irrelevant. What's important is that it is defined
and agreed upon so that applications can take advantage of it.

Once the API is defined, one can write a SAX implementation 
of it from scratch. Or, one can adapt the existing XSL based
processors (whether SAX based or not)


Yes, it's true that one can think of XSL as just a "unix like filter"
xml | sax processor | xsl processor | xsl processor | ... | handle output,
but to me, an XSL processor has a lot of code in it that I would like
to interact with besides input+stylesheet = output.

Even on the Unix command line filter model, there are lots of things I
can do (like specify arguments, redirection, substitution, etc), likewise,
there are things besides "input stylesheet" that need to be defined.


just IMHO,
-Ray





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