Advice needed on placement of datatype validation methods

[keshlam@xxxxxxxxxx]

I have to admit that I still don't fully understand NOTATIONs, but they do
seem to be the closest that the current DTD syntax comes to a
datatype-interpretation declaration.

Note that some of the schema proposals have more explicit datatype
validation support built into them, so this may wind up resolving itself
after all the dust has settled.


Re the debate over whether XSL is not powerful enough (or too powerful): As
I understand it, XSL's goal was to define a lighter-weight alternative to
full SGML processing which was easy to implement and use, yet adequate to
cover the common cases. (I seem to remember that the goal was something
like 90% coverage.) It was explicitly recognized that you can manually
process the document to achieve anything the XSL transformations can do,
but XSL provides a higher-level tool for the purpose.

So if it doesn't do what you need, that may in fact mean that what you need
is legitimately outside XSL's intended scope, and you may want to go up to
SGML or down to scripting.
On the other hand, I have found XSL pretty respectable so far, and as
others have pointed out it's still evolving -- if you see a need, propose a
solution.

My single largest gripe has been XSL's inability to specify a rule that
operates on text blocks (Text and CText nodes in DOM-tree terms), which is
a problem when attempting to use it to wrap formatting information around
documents not originally designed for formattability such as XMLified HTML.
Has that been fixed? If not, could we please have it fixed? It ought to be
a trivial change; all that's needed is a way to express it in the pattern
language... and I don't insist on being able to match on the text's
content; matching only on its context would (again) close 90% of the gap.
______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research
Unless stated otherwise, all opinions are solely those of the author.



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