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

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 5:22 PM +0000 2/4/03, Michael Kay wrote:

> That's very hard to do. There are good reasons why XSLT is defined in
> terms of a transformation of one data model instance to another, leaving
> a great deal of flexibility as to how (and whether) the data model
> instance is derived from some source XML document. If we said that the
> input had to be source XML, then we could define exactly what happened
> to it, but I don't think we want to do that, and the net result is that
> you (and therefore your chosen vendor) can do anything you like to the
> document before the XSLT transformation starts.

And one more time I disagree with this. The problem is not as bad as 
you make it out. You do not need to say that the input must be 
derived from some source XML document. You simply need to state that 
when the input is derived directly from a source XML document, then 
the data model is precisely specified. You could further require that 
all conforming implementations provide a means to convert a source 
XML document to the data model. Now, if someone wants to feed in 
something that is not a source XML document, then the sky's the 
limit. But there's no reason we can't be quite precise about what 
happens when the input is in fact a source XML document.
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Writer/Programmer |
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|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
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