Re: Serialization

On 7/6/07, Alessandro Vernet <avernet@orbeon.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I realize that this is something we have in XSLT. My guess is that
> this was added to XSLT when it was imagined that XSLT would be used in
> browsers, and the browser would directly do the transformation and
> serialization to (X)HTML. So it was important to able to specify both
> in the same file. I feel things have changed, and that nowadays it
> makes more sense to keep transformation and serialization separate.

It was added because people felt that the author of the stylesheet needed
to have full control as stylesheets are distributed to users who treat
them as black boxes.   Certainly, the use case of a browser invoking
a transformation is one of those "black boxes".

I feel strongly that:

   * this is a very important feature for deployment encapsultation
   * the implementation cost is low as it just passes a set of
     "options" to a serializer
   * the complexity cost is low because an author just optionally
      sets serialization options
   * this is something which your average XSLT author is familiar
   * this is something that XSLT 2 spent a lot of time to get right because
      there was a real need in the XSLT user community.  As such, we'll
      have that need too.

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics

Received on Saturday, 7 July 2007 15:28:46 UTC