Subject: Re: [xsl] question about identity transform From: "Dimitre Novatchev" <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 08:51:39 -0800 |
From a user's perspective, how is it helpful to make a distinction between processing order and result order?
It is always helpful to know the truth in advance than to discover it by accident.
If we, as users, can't use the word "process" (because it's reserved for implementation details) then what word do we use?
We can say that" the nodes selected by the expression as specified the select attribute are *processed" not in any predefined order -- in indeterministic way" ... or "asynchronously", if the latter is more understandable. Both of these definitions of processing mean that there is no specified order.
A very good real-world analogy was made by Wendell Piez and you also got two excellent replies from Dr. Kay and David Carlisle, to which it would be difficult to add something significant.
-- Cheers, Dimitre Novatchev --------------------------------------- Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence. --------------------------------------- To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk ------------------------------------- You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play
Dimitre Novatchev wrote: > The order in which an <xsl:apply-templates> instruction is applied on > the nodes selected by the expression as specified in its select > attribute is not defined and may be in any order. Surely it's misleading to say that the processing order is "not defined". From a user's perspective, how is it helpful to make a distinction between processing order and result order? If we, as users, can't use the word "process" (because it's reserved for implementation details) then what word do we use?
I haven't implemented an XSLT processor, but when is this distinction even useful, in practice?
I could say that it's undefined what order the XSLT processor processes the nodes in and whether or not it first translates them to Swahili and back. The important thing is that the result is "as if" it was processed in document order (and not translated to another human language)... Is there something about processing nodes in document order that seems so inefficient that we have to go out of our way to make this distinction?
Evan
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