Re: Simple syntax

/ Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> was heard to say:
| I like the idea of hiding fundamental components such as "load",
| "save", "tee" and "identity" from users as much as possible.

So do I.

| For the sake of simplicity, perhaps a shorthand for the save component could be
| to have an optional href attribute on <p:output>, and a save attribute that
| defaults to true if the href attribute is present.

What's the save attribute for? What would this mean?

  <p:output name="document" label="doc1" href="doc.xml" save="no"/>

Are you thinking of the case where some later component does an
xinclude of doc.xml but you don't actually ever want to serialize it?

| Having default input/output
| names might also make defining pipelines a bit less tedious. In other words:

Indeed. It seems reasonable to allow an href attribute to be a
shorthand for the load and save components.

If two (or more) steps use the same input, can we assume the pipeline
engine will be able to infer the tees?

I would like it to be the case that pipeline analysis occurs
(conceptually) in the following stages:

1. Conversion to the XML syntax (if we define a compact syntax)
2. Expansion of shorthands (producing a new, valid pipeline with no
   shortcuts.
3. Detection of static errors.
4. Evaluation of the pipeline

But I'm content to visit the question of what shorthands we support,
and how, until we've got a better handle on the actual language.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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