Re: Choice of transformation language?

On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 11:02 +0200, Ivan Herman wrote:
> Maybe an editorial comment only.
> 
> Section 6 is a little bit vague, to my taste, as to whether GRDDL
> *requires* the transformation to be XSLT or XSLT2 or not.
> 
> If the intention is to require it, than this should be formulated
> clearly (the transformation MUST be XSLT or XSLT2).

The intention is not to require it, but indeed to allow
a choice of transformation language.

This was identified as issue whichlangs and resolved 30 August.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-grddl-20061024/#issue-whichlangs


> If there is no such requirement (and the second paragraph of the section
> seems to suggest that), then there is a technical question: how does a
> GRDDL implementation know what transformation engine should be used?

By the normal mechanisms of web architecture; MIME types, for example.

In section 2 of the GRDDL spec, we have...

[[
An XML document whose root element has an attribute with a local name of
transformation and a namespace name of
http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view# has a GRDDL transformation for each
resource identified by a URI reference listed in the value of the
attribute (c.f. section 4.4.1. URI references in [WEBARCH]).
]]
 -- http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-grddl-20061024/#grddl-xml

and if you follow that link and read about URI references
and URIs, you eventually get to...

[[
 8. The agent interprets the returned representation according to the
data format specification that corresponds to the representation's
Internet Media Type 
]]
 -- http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/#uri-dereference

>  Is
> there a need for another attribute/element specifying this (although I
> would not know how exactly...)?

When a GRDDL implementation is fetching the transformation, it
may use the HTTP Accept: header to specify the transformation
formats it prefers/accepts. I have an action to add an appendix
to show some details like this in a sample implementation.

We intend to develop test cases to demonstrate how transformation
languages other than XSLT may be used. We have an XProc example
in progress, for one.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Thursday, 26 October 2006 13:29:33 UTC