Re: [xsl] is XSLT 2.0 implementable? (was: N : M transformation)

Subject: Re: [xsl] is XSLT 2.0 implementable? (was: N : M transformation)
From: Daniel Veillard <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 22:15:36 +0100
On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 09:47:23PM +0100, Tobias Reif wrote:
> Daniel Veillard wrote:
> > The dependancy on W3C XML Schemas makes it very very unlikely for me.
> I agree that dependency on WXS is a bad aspect, but I think it won't be 
> required for all implementations.

  First news to me, how can you back-up that statement ?

> > I can't implement a specification I don't understand.
> Then there is a lot of room for improvement regarding the spec.

  Well that would probably lead to a complete revamp of
of the structure part.

> > As as side
> > effect I can't implement specifications depending on it too.
> Would Relax NG in the place of WXS solve your problems?

  Of course not: Relax NG does not allow to identify type, at 
best it delegates recognition of "simple types" to other
specifications like the datatype part of XML Schemas (which is fine
BTW). Relax NG is dedicated to validation, not to map types to
part of an XML subtree.

> >    Life is short ... I don't want to bury month and months of
> > mine into trying to implement (and support !) a spec which is
> > just too unclear to be understood reliably.
> Did you express all this as feedback to the editor, authors, and working 
> group?

  I think Michael and Henry know me well enough, and that I propagated
that back to them. It's also clear that I tried an implementation within
libxml2 but it became quickly too painful that I focused on other targets.

> I think the spec can only improve if every implementer feeds back any 
> problems he sees, especially if they keep him from implementing the spec.

  I don't think I'm the only one :-)
There is also a threshold of how much feedback seems needed to
clear up points of a spec. In most case a focused feedback makes
sense (and I know that, I have been involved in W3C working group
activities first as staff and then as external contributor since 98)
and is rightly appreciated. But the Primer can't replace an authoritative
spec where when you have a question reading it provide the answer,
that is very hard for most of XML Schemas Structure part.
Anyway I didn't want to get into this rathole, I'm just stating
why I think at this point that I won't be able to implement XSLT-2.0
nor XPath-2.0 anytime soon.

Daniel

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