RE: Mozilla Support for XSL XSLT? Yes, please!

> Happy to see a fellow C++ programmer (I heard that we are an endangered
> specie :-))

Are we? Oh well, I like C++...

> So if you want to integrate your XSLT engine in Mozilla then you'll probably
> sit the engine on the Mozilla DOM engine, will you?

Heh, I've answered this a few times... Well, here goes again :)

The engine is going to be split up into two major parts:
- A bridge, for building XML applications on top of any Infoset-conformant
  XML implementation. (In this case, Mozilla's DOM, but could be Apache's
  or whatever).
- The XSLT engine itself, which will be built on this bridge.

This separation lets me both easily (hopefully) integrate with Mozilla,
and build the XSLT engine entirely independently of Mozilla's
architecture, so that anything could conceivably use it.

> What kind of algorithm are you using?

Okay, this is the part where you might be disappointed in me. Keep in
mind, I haven't coded a single line of this yet... but here's the basic
idea:

The bridge will be aware of what types of elements are in its tree
structure, either by namespace-matching, or some other intelligent
heuristic which could be plugged in. The elements have their actual
functionality extended (through some object-oriented trickery) based on
their type. So in this case, elements in a stylesheet would know how to
process themselves.

The neat thing, if I get it to work (and this is the part that's
interesting about my honors thesis) is that it will support incremental
processing. That is, as changes come in to the source tree, those changes
are immediately reflected in the result tree, without having to re-process
the entire document. This is where efficiency comes into play. I'm
figuring that all XPath expressions will keep track of their result, and
if they change, then they will force the relevant chunk of result-tree to
change.

I've been doing some work on this, and it seems promising in terms of
optimizations, but it remains to be seen :)

Anyway, I'd ask for help on this, as I'm sure some folks might find this
interesting, but I can't accept any since it would invalidate my thesis
work, and I'd get kicked out of school or something bad like that... But
feel free to kick around the idea. I'm implementing this in C++; maybe
some of you would like to do an independent Java version...

I'm psyched to see that people are interested in this!

Dan


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