RE: result-document from a temporary tree

There are several Michaels on the WG, but as this was from you, I guessed it
might be for me...

We didn't log this as a formal comment, because it was past the closing date
for the last call, and related to an issue that the WG had already discussed
and decided. The result of not logging it is that there is no guarantee of a
response. Your comment was on 11 May 2004, in support of a message from
Andre Cusson on 9 April 2003:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2003Mar/0095.html

to which I replied at:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2003Mar/0096.html


I think the answer to your example is basically the same: yes, the
restriction is inconvenient. All restrictions that prevent side-effects are
inconvenient, but the WG believes that they are in the best interests of the
language. If this rule was removed, you could declare a variable which is
never used, but whose declaration has the side-effect of creating a result
document, and we would have great difficulty defining in the language
semantics whether the result document in that situation is or is not
written.

I sometimes find it best to think in terms of a transformation producing a
single supertree as its output, in which the supertree can contain document
nodes as children of an element (or other) node. When the supertree is
serialized, each document node results in a separate serialized result
document. In fact, at one stage we actually described the processing model
in those terms (the only problem was that it distorted the data model). When
you think of it in this way, it becomes quite self-evident that you can only
create a result document at the point in the processing where you are
creating its parent in the supertree: the "restriction" then becomes a
simple and natural extension of the sequential processing model for writing
a single result tree (you can't update the result tree in situ).



The XSL WG has now disposed of all but two of its formal issues (hopefully
it dealt with the last two yesterday, but I haven't seen the minutes yet).
There are rather longer lists of issues still outstanding on XPath, the data
model, serialization, F+O etc.

 
Regards,

Michael Kay


> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-qt-comments-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-qt-comments-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Willink, Ed
> Sent: 25 August 2004 07:53
> To: 'public-qt-comments@w3.org'
> Subject: RE: result-document from a temporary tree
> 
> 
> Hi Michael
> 
> I have noticed many prompt and considered responses from the 
> WGs in the
> last few months, but no response to
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May
> /0027.html
> 
> Did it get overlooked as a late rejoinder to an informal issue?
> 
> 	Regards
> 			
> 		Ed Willink
> 
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Received on Wednesday, 25 August 2004 08:05:27 UTC