Re: The first five minutes ... a thought experiment (long)

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 10:21 PM, Paul Mensonides <pmenso57@comcast.net> wrote:

>
> 2c
>
> As someone that just recently started using XProc (and learning XML Schema
> 1.1 and XSLT/XPath 2.0 at the same time), I have not had a particularly hard
> time figuring it out.
>
> -----
>
> There are some things that I have found bizarre.  In particular, why are
> "documents" flowing through pipes rather that just (e.g.) XPath data values
> (of which documents are just one form).  Related to that, documents and
> parameters (for e.g. XSLT) are all more or less XPath data values, and it
> would be nice if there was a uniform way that such data could be passed
> around.  But that hasn't been difficult to figure out, just noted.

There are plenty of things that do not fit into the XDM.  For example,
what is the XDM data value for a image?  In V2, we have a requirement
to handle non-XML documents so that you can retrieve a binary (e.g. an
image) and have it flow through the pipeline without it being
marshalled into a base64 representation and then wrapped by an
element.

At the same time, allowing random XDM values means the you can have
pipelines that just process a sequence of numbers.  At that point, I
would question why you aren't just using XQuery as you aren't getting
much from pipelining language.

-- 
--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 Thursday, 20 February 2014 10:41:55 UTC