RE: Extended file extentions (XfeX) for xml/xsl files

[Mark Birbeck <Mark.Birbeck@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> Choices are
> 
>  single chars:
> 
>    "."    standard.xmlspec.html.xsl
>    "-"    standard-xmlspec-html.xsl
>    "_"    standard_xmlspec_html.xsl 
>    "@"    standard@xmlspec@html.xsl
>    ...
> 
>  more complex char names
> 
>   "[]"   standard.[xmlspec][html].xsl
>   "{-}"  standard.{xmlspec-html}.xsl

> What are your comments? (please, let's not get too religious 
> about this, let's come up with real arguments, not personal
> esthetic reasons only)

Tell *that* to Nietzsche! ;-)

I like the proposition. I wonder if you might want to consider some
aspects from another direction, to see if we can harmonise. In
particular when the name is used in a full URL:

1. I'd avoid '[' and ']' because of XPath. I already read XML
   from a database with a sort of sub-XPath, and I'm sure others
   have done the full thing:

	http://server/articles/article[@ID=5]

2. If you can, keep away from the '.' because it already breaks the
   document name from the document format. In my case I use it to
   separate the stylesheet that should be applied to an XML document
   from the content type to use for return:

	http://server/articles/article[@ID=5]/article.htm

   gives me the XML for article 5 as an HTML document, created using
   http://server/stylesheets/article.xsl, whilst:

	http://server/articles/article[@ID=5]/article.xml

   would give the same transformation (stylesheets/article.xsl) but
   set the content type to XML (say for XHTML). The reason I do this,
   is so I can have things like:

	http://server/articles/article[@ID=5]/word.doc

   and:

	http://server/people/person[@ID=5]/person.vcf

   which allows piping my XML straight into some application. It
   also allows easy specification of different stylesheets for
   alternative output:

	http://server/articles/article[@ID=5]/handheld.htm

3. I have begun to extend this logic as follows:

	http://server/articles/article[@ID=5]/summary.handheld.htm

   and:

	http://server/articles/article[@ID=5]/summary.WebTV.htm

   Therefore, if I was to make my stylesheet names more meaningfull
   using your syntax, I might have a stylesheet called:

	article_fo.xsl

   and another called:

	fo_handheld.xsl

   and yet another called:

	fo_WebTV.xsl

   Then my URLs might become:

	http://server/articles/article[@ID=5]/article_fo.fo_WebTV.htm

What do you think?

Regards,

Mark


Mark Birbeck
Managing Director
x-port.net Ltd.
220 Bon Marché Centre
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London
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w: http://www.iedigital.net/
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e: Mark.Birbeck@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


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