Re: [xsl] Windows Batchfile calling Saxon - Confusion of / and \

[Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Kay wrote:
> There are unfortunately many products that accept Windows filenames in
> contexts where the standards mandate a URI. I have been resisting doing
> this, because I think standards conformance should outweigh minor
> convenience. However, I've been dithering a little on this one recently,
> because once everyone breaks a standard in the same way, they establish a
> new de facto standard. 
>   

Yes, but this is only where user convenience is important. When it comes 
to programming languages, this does not hold. I.e., in C++, when you 
type a pathname, the \ still escapes the next character and won't all of 
a sudden become a path separator when doing File.open(...). Same in 
Java, or in Java .properties files.

If a programmer wants to admit windows paths and UNC paths for files 
etc, then it can easily program translate($path, '\'. '/'). But I sure 
hope you don't bend the specs in this area. External entities in XML are 
not supposed to have windows paths, nor do paths in SVG or HTML (which 
gives security errors or nothing). Instead, for "user convenience", you 
could consider a convenience extension function: uri-from-unc-path(), or 
uri-from-system().

> However, since Windows has been supporting use of forward-slash in filenames
> for about ten years, I find it surprising that people still want to use
> backslashes.

Make that twenty years ;) It's allowed since DOS 2.0 (in API, kernel 
etc), but the command interpreter of the shell only accepted it, I 
believe, when the NT kernel was introduced.

Cheers,
-- Abel Braaksma