Re: [xsl] XSLT 1.1 comments

Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT 1.1 comments
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 10:08:41 GMT

> I would however have liked to see Mike Kay's and David Carlisles responses
> to some of the other requests for 'extensions to do X'. Listening on this
> list
> it would appear that most of the problems can be answered by their level of
> expertise. I fear you may have been misled by users lack of expertise.

Ah, but I don't promise to provide a service producing arcane XSLT
tricks for ever, so I'm not sure this argument holds.

The danger of adding xsl:script is that it will be abused.
(if I see disable-output-encoding="yes">&lt;p&gt; again I think I'll
scream) But if it isn't added, then you see msxml:script (and in time,
xxx:script as well) and I'm not sure that that is really any better.

However I really do miss a common namespace for built in extensions.
just about everyone had  xxx:node-set() xx:document() extensions
in XSLT 1.0. They go away for 1.1 which is a good thing, but it looks
like xxx:evaluate() xxx:difference() etc will be similarly widely
distributed. I don't want to use xsl:script to access different java
ecmascript or python implementations of these things, I just want to
use them, but bind the xxx: prefix to
http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform/Extensions
which would probably have to be
http://www.w3.org/2001/XSL/Transform/Extensions
due to the W3C's half baked policy of allocating namespace names.


However having spent some time courtesy of the evil empire, I would say
that when using a scripting language it definitely _is_ convenient to be
able to inline the code for small extension functions in msxml:script.
I don't really see that the addition of xsl:script encourages this use
as implemntors can and have added extension elements with this
functionality already. In the case of msxml mainly I've wanted to add
features that are provided as built in extensions in other systems, such
as writing to multiple files. This isn't provided but can be done
with a couple of lines of javascript in msxml:script. As someone who
doesn't really program in javascript (very confusing language, variables
keep changing their value all over the place) I found this a rather
convenient mechanism.

David

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


Current Thread