Re: Serialization

/ Alessandro Vernet <avernet@orbeon.com> was heard to say:
| On 7/2/07, Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.org> wrote:
|> The minimalist proposal is to add all the options to the appropriate steps and
|> not allow a serialization declaration.  That takes care of steps that have to
|> serialize but does not take care of pipeline outputs.
|>
|> Those steps would be at least 'p:store' and 'p:http-request'.
|>
|> My preference would be to have the serialization declaration for pipeline
|> outputs as well.
|
| That would tell the pipeline engine how to serialize, but not where to
| serialize. What are the use cases where this would be useful? I can't
| think of any, and would rather have serialization done in the last
| step of the pipeline.

The use case I think Alex wants to support, and I'm symphathetic, is
the analog of the XSLT case where a serialized HTML document is
produced on stdout.

If you wrap that stylesheet in a pipeline, you'll get an XML document
From the XSLT step, not an HTML one. In order to add a store step,
you'll have to say where it should be stored.

If we allow the serialization options at the pipeline level (somehow),
then the pipeline can do the right thing with the outputs.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Oh well, no matter what happens,
http://nwalsh.com/            | there's always death.-- Napoleon