Re: [xsl] keys and idrefs - XSLT2 request?

Subject: Re: [xsl] keys and idrefs - XSLT2 request?
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 10:20:13 +0100
Yes, that is a reason, but I don't think it a strong enough reason to
hold up development of XSLT 1.x.

Adding support for new simple types such as dates, and adding support
for regexp is clear extra functionality that would be good an useful
(and clearly should use the types from schema). It also is potentially
far less disruptive to XSLT as it's essentially just an enlarged core
function library with operations on those types, and some new rules
and/or constructs for type casting.

But adding support for matching on complex types is different.
Your example of matching template rules on an "address" type is at best
a minor convenience feature. There is no way you would ever write a
regexp handler in XSLT 1.0, but you might easily write the template
rules for the various elements of that schema-type, you might even
automatically generate those templates from the schema decalaration.

As I mentioned in my reply to the other similar "date" example
having lots of elements with the same "address" type is reasonable: it
means they have the same internal structure. If you also want to match
them all with the same processing templates, it is less reasonable,
if they have the same type and same processing they could have the same
name. If you are just using the types to unify two dufferent document
types with different element names, then that could more naturally be
seen in XSLT terms as doing a pre-transformation to a common document
type (perhaps one in which the element names are based on the schema
types) and then doing the main transformation. Given the (now defunct)
XSLT implicit result-tree-node set conversion, this would have been easy
to achieve in a single stylesheet.

David

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