RE: Future XSLT expansion.

Hi Paul,

Paul said:
I have the same thing in mind right from the beginning. That's not my
problem than instead of reading my letters I was bashed as a
student, who has to read XPath specifation, address everything in this
world with URIs and ignore  the ( de-facto existing ) node-set() typecast.

Didier replies:
Accept my apologies. I thought that you accused me of proposing an extension
when the construct in question  is in fact part of the specs. I understand
that maybe you are struggling with the English language and that what I read
is maybe not what you intended to say. Sorry about that, but understand that
I wasn't born with the innate knowledge that English is maybe not as easy
for you.

This said, I still do not see how we can have, let's say, an RTF document
transformed into a node set in a coherent way on all XSLT engines and for
all text formats. I think that this can probably be better handled by XSLT
extensions per se, but probably not in a standard way. To have all possible
text format to be transformed into node sets - in a coherent way - would
necessitate to have this feature specified in a recommendation. And because
of the huge quantity of possible text formats out there, I doubt that this
is possible.

What is probably possible though, is to have a standard mechanism for
extension not based on Java but probably on Ecma script which is a standard.
The script may return a node set and internally deal on how to create the
node set. If we choose such option,We will then need to specify the
normative functions added to the core ECMA script thatcan handle text
processing and information set building (the latter being interfaced with
the DOM already defined by a recommendation). This is not a minor task.

Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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