Re: [xsl] XSLT and XInclude?

[dvint@xxxxxxxxx]

> At 2009-03-21 13:35 -0400, Dan Vint wrote:
>>I've come across some documents that are using XInclude to fragment
>>a larger tech manual. I've got the basic stylesheet working that
>>reads the document name from the href and then opens it with the
>>doc() function.
>>
>>In this particular case, I'm able to process the content properly as
>>the included document has a regular structure that I can process
>>directly. I got to thinking though that I might need to process
>>these included files within the context of their use/placement in
>>the referencing document.
>
>  From a processing perspective I would pass including context
> information in tunnel parameters to the template rules acting on the
> included content.  This XSLT 2.0 feature is amazing and I've found it
> very useful.


I haven't worked with 2.0 very much, so I wasn't aware of this feature, I
was looking for a parameter on the doc() function itself. I think this
might do the trick. Mainly I had been trying to use a mode on the template
but I don't think that was working


>
> But I'm not sure that is the focus of your post.
>
>>Anyway, there was some change tracking markup added via some
>>add/delete elements in a different namespace. Within the parent the
>>namespace was defined, but the included file didn't have the
>>declaration. When this file was passed to the doc function it
>>errored out because the namespace wasn't defined in the included file.
>
> Looking at http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xinclude-20061115/ I think
> you are stuck.  Section 4.2 indicates that the resource is treated as
> application/xml and so it would have to be well-formed.

Thanks, I've got to figure out how these documents ended up the way they
did. There was a combination of editing with an XML editor and possibly
some other programatic changes that might have stripped the namespace from
the included file.

I was just surprised that the editor we use treated this as a valid
document and it wasn't until I processed the files with saxon that I got
an error. I was also "thinking" that this was a hybrid entity which it's
not, so that threw off my internal processing model and how things might
work.


>
>>I fixed this problem by correcting the included file, but if I could
>>have passed the context (in this case the namespace information) I
>>wouldn't have had a problem.
>
> That is a parsing context issue as opposed to a processing context
> issue.  While I believe processing context discussions are
> appropriate for stylesheets and other applications working on XML, I
> do not think we have any latitude to work with the parsing
> context.  I cannot see any way of proposing changes to the parsing
> context that would not destabilize the entire concept of
> well-formedness.  Given one can use a conforming XML processor to
> implement XInclude, proposing any changes to XInclude to incorporate
> an external augmentation of the parsing context would prevent an
> existing conforming XML processor to work.
>
> So unless I've misunderstood you, I think you are stuck having to
> require the application adding the change tracking markup to
> correctly create a well-formed XML document.

This was a specific issue that surprised me from a couple of different
standpoints. The folks that created this process used the XInclude as a
replacement for entities and they have different properties. I got sucked
in thinking XInclude was an entity substitute as well (that's how our
editor seems to treat them as well). Thinking about it from the included
document side, they should be valid documents.

thanks

..dan

>
> I hope this helps.
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken
>
> --
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