RE: [xsl] General rule for designing XPath expressions to return items in document order?

Subject: RE: [xsl] General rule for designing XPath expressions to return items in document order?
From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2014 16:33:38 +0000
For those of us who will not be attending XML Prague, how can we learn the
streaming stuff that Michael and Alex will be presenting?

/Roger

>
> This is all going to keep this list active for ever:-)
>
> It remains to be seen I think how far just having a naive mental model
> of the kind of things that ought to work in a streaming context will
> lead to expressions that are in fact defined to be streaming in the spec
> (or are streaming in the implementations).

Indeed. I think this is the topic of Abel Braaksma's talk at XML Prague: from
what I've seen, I believe his aim is to show that the horrendously complex
rules in the spec can be reduced for practical programming purposes to a few
easily remembered rules of thumb. Let's wait and see.

(Hopefully it's a bit like static type checking. The rules in the Formal
Semantics spec were completely inaccessible to the average user, but they
generally gave the same result as one would intuitively expect.)

Obviously while developing the rules we've been quite concerned with the
tension between two objectives: making as much as possible streamable, and
making the rules simple and easy to remember.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

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