Re: [xsl] PI for associating a sample input with a stylesheet [was Re: [xsl] Xselerator]

["Abel Braaksma (online)" <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi George,

Thanks again for your quick response.

In a perfect world, there are no lock-ins. If Oxygen were to create
a specific PI (like Firefox recently added parameters to the
xml-stylesheet PI) is would become a lock-in and people don't like
that. Of course, a PI is harmless if nothing is done with it, but
still.

Things will get worse if other companies start to use their own PI.
And even more worse if, when you run a transform, the PI is
automatically added (Altova). I dislike that very much and that is
one (of many) reasons why I didn't stick to that product.

However, a PI is nothing more than a name and a string. How
difficult would it be to make it a setting, say, something like:

   PI name for test xml: 'test-xml-input-file'
   PI test xml tokenize regex: \s+

then the PI would look like this:

<?test-xml-input-file sometestfile.xml ?>


This would give the end user all ways to use its own custom methods.
Note that when you would want to impose a "standard", you cannot
start the PI with 'xml' without the consent of W3C (they are
reserved).



Cheers,
-- Abel Braaksma


> Hi Abel,
>
> I see what you mean. I read the message too quickly and I thought
> you
> were referring to the xml-stylesheet PI.
> I do not see any difficulties to implement this similar with the way
> we
> implemented the xml-styelsheet PI support. However, it will be great
> if
> instead of an oXygen specific PI we would be able to use something
> more
>    generic.
>
> I am curious how much interest is in having such a PI. I remember
> that I
> was pro having a PI to associate a Relax NG schema with an XML
> document
> and there was a strong reaction against making a proposal for such a
> PI
> on the Relax NG list. So what people think about such a PI?