Re: XSLT V 1.1

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

The debate about document() and saxon:evaluate should probably be
reopened through the angle of the support of XPointer by XSLT/XPath as
well.

It's a point I have recently submitted [1] to the
www-xml-linking-comments@xxxxxx mailing list.

If applications using XPointer (such as XLink and XInclude) are
developed, it will become necessary to be able to derefence XSLT
XPointer values and to retrieve the node-sets they point.

When you find in your source document something like:

<elt xlink:href="doc.xml#id"...
or
<elt xlink:href="doc.xml#xpointer(//book[isbn='0836217462'])"...
or even 
<elt xlink:href="#xpointer(//book[isbn='0836217462'])"...

it seems quite natural to want to be able to retrieve the node pointed
by "@xlink:href".

XPointer can be seen as an extra level of granularity added on top of
"usual" URIs and using the document() function could seem natural.

However, the fact that a XPointer expression equal to "#id" is pointing
to the node whose ID is "id" in the current document while document("")
is pointing to the current stylesheet could, IMHO, make it quite
confusing if we said that the current document() function was to be used
with XPointers as an argument.

Whatever solution is chosen (using the document() function or adding a
new function), the support of XPointer in XSLT/XPath would require
supporting variable XPath since XPointer is built on XPath and allowing
to write whatever-function(@xlink:href) where
@xlink:href="#xpointer(//book[isbn='0836217462'])" is in fact allowing a
variable XPath expression.

Best regards,

Eric

[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JulSep/0151.html

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Eric van der Vlist       Dyomedea                    http://dyomedea.com
http://xmlfr.org         http://4xt.org              http://ducotede.com
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