xinclude and xslt

dear xinclude editors.

thanks for preparing this updated version of the xinclude
recommendation. i have a comment to make which maybe will not
influence the technical content, but at least may be interesting to
consider as an appendix:

you are certainly well aware of the fact that because of xinclude's
definition being based on the infoset level, it is technically
impossible to create a conforming xinclude processor using xslt (1.0
or 2.0). i think this is a pity, because xslt is a very frequently
used and powerful xml technology, and it would be nice to have
something with xinclude's functionality being available on the
xslt-level.

i recently had to consider implementing xinclude using xslt, and i am
still hesitating, because i know that my implementation will never be
xinclude-compliant, even if it works perfectly well for an xslt
environment where the problematic areas (notations and unparsed
entities) are not relevant.

http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200608/msg00450.html

so i have the following questions/suggestions:

- it might be helpful to add a section about why xinclude cannot be
implemented with xslt (2.0). this could clarify this issue to people
looking for how to use generic inclusion facilities in
xslt. currently, xslt is not mentioned in the xinclude recommendation
at all.

- it would be even better to turn the non-xslt-accessible parts of
required xinclude behavior into optional behavior, so that it would
become possible to implement xinclude using xslt 2.0. this way, such
an xslt-based xinclude processor could call itself "minimally
conformant", while other implementations could claim to support a
higher levels of conformance.

but maybe it is just me with my admittedly very xslt-oriented mindset
who is a bit surprised by the fact that i cannot implement this
specification using the latest and greatest w3c xml transformation
technology. i hope i was able to express myself clearly, if not, i'd
be glad to give it another try!

kind regards,

erik wilde       tel:+1-510-6432253 - fax:+1-510-6425814
     dret@ischool.berkeley.edu - http://dret.net/netdret
     School of Information (iSchool) - UC Berkeley (UCB)

Received on Wednesday, 8 November 2006 12:45:03 UTC