Re: Comments on Editor's Draft 9 January 2008

/ Toman_Vojtech@emc.com was heard to say:
| Yes, it is. Thanks for responding to this. I guess I am fine with the
| way how it works now, except there is still one thing I am not that
| happy with: Because the pipeline must have a "main" (or top-level)
| p:pipeline, the specification is effectively forcing the pipeline
| author/user to use a certain "interface" (the "source" and "result"
| ports, plus maybe some additional ports). Internally, you can declare
| any sub-pipelines you want, but on the top level, you don't have this
| freedom.

Yes, you do, you just have to use the "full form". There's nothing wrong
with a pipeline document that begins:

<p:declare-step type="my:pipeline" xmlns:p="..." xmlns:my="...">
  <p:input port="fred"/>
  <p:input port="barney"/>
  <p:output port="bedrock"/>

  <p:xslt ...> ... </p:xslt>
  <p:xslt ...> ... </p:xslt>
  <p:xslt ...> ... </p:xslt>
</p:declare-step>

and a pipeline processor is expected to be able to run that pipeline
just as if it had had "p:pipeline" as its document element.

| While I can see the reasoning behind fixing the "source" and "result"
| ports, I think it can makes certain things difficult to achieve (unless
| wou want to use ugly workarounds in your pipelines). I understand that
| the most common use case is: take XML document(s) - do something -
| output result XML document(s), but there may be other (even though
| possibly weird) scenarios, such as the following:

Yes, and you can do all those things, just not with the shortcut syntax.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | All professional men are handicapped by
http://nwalsh.com/            | not being allowed to ignore things
                              | which are useless.-- Goethe