RE: XSL as a better XPointer was RE: The Cathedral and the Bizarre (was: do you use pi's?)

["Jonathan Borden" <jborden@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oops... I was using XQL, and a newly proposed function (region) at that!

XSL, under the current working draft has no notion of regions, and very
limited support for string manipulation to boot.

However, we see that with a few extensions, namely XQL, the XSL pattern
matching language (language #3) can serve as an effective XML pointer
description language. A range is a funny sort of 'pointer' in any case, it
corresponds to a paired start location/pointer and end location/pointer.
This can be expressed as a pair of XSL/XQL patterns.

Paul Prescod wrote:
>
> Jonathan Borden wrote:
> >         foo/text()/region("better Xpointer (less weight")
>
> If you are going to reference an XSL variant it would help if you would
> give a URL for it. Where is the region function documented?
>
> And how would you represent this:
>
> <BLAH>
>    <BLAH>
>       <BLAH>
>          A span from _here_
>       </BLAH>
>       <BLAH>Blah</BLAH>
>    </BLAH>
> To _here_.
> </BLAH>
>
> You can't use numeric ranges anymore.

	This problem for this one using XSL/XQL is that the span is not determined
by nodes themselves rather the second _here_ is *after* the /BLAH/BLAH
node... on the other hand, is there really a need for 2 distinct languages
(e.g. XPointer and XSL), and couldn't some of these functions be added to
say XSL Level 1 or 2?

Jonathan Borden
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net


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