Auxiliary documents (Was: Re: XProc: An XML Pipeline Language)

Rui Lopes wrote:
> Norman Walsh wrote:
>> An XSLT 1.0 processor can only have a single principle input document
>> (I don't know how, or if, we deal with the fact that the stylesheet
>> can load auxilliary documents), but it can produce multiple result
>> documents. (Ok, technically, it can't, but every XSLT 1.0 processor
>> except the MS one has an extension that does so.)
> 
> Should we dismiss stylesheet's auxiliar documents? The same question may 
> be asked regarding an XInclude processor, should we dismiss the 
> documents specified in xi:include elements? I raise the question, 
> although I haven't got an answer to that :)

My take on this is that we *must* support XInclude, and however we 
support XInclude's access to auxiliary documents, the same method should 
apply to XSLT.

An XInclude processor needs to somehow get hold of a document given a 
URI. Either the pipeline processor controls the retrieval (acts as an 
entity resolver) or the component does. The current design implies the 
latter.

We also need to decide whether/how to support the situation where the 
auxiliary document is itself the result of a pipeline, or whether we 
explicitly exclude this. We need to say what happens when a "Saved" 
document is "Loaded" or requested as an auxiliary document, particularly 
if we want to allow parallel processing strategies.

Cheers,

Jeni
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com

Received on Wednesday, 12 April 2006 11:15:00 UTC