Re: XBL media type?

Ian,

Your point was that you couldn't imagine a use case for an XSLT file
that has <xbl> as a root element--hopefully now you can at least see
one, even if you don't like it.

Also, it's pretty easy to express HTC using XML, and so make it
processable by XML tools. (And conversely, generate it with XML
tools.)

And XSLT seems a pretty sane way of processing XML to me.

But all of this is irrelevant...the points were only being made in
order to illustrate a need for a feature. I see you're not opposed to
this feature, so there's obviously little point in debating further
whether it's needed or not. :)

Regards,

Mark

On 23/08/06, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On 8/23/06, Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@x-port.net> wrote:
> >
> > (And to answer Ian's question as to why you might want to have such an
> > XSLT file--how about a transform for creating XBL from HTC?)
>
> HTC isn't XML, so it's not clear to me how this would work. Even if it
> was, e.g. if you were converting RCC to XBL, XSLT still wouldn't be a
> sane way of doing it. And even if it was sane, there would still never
> be a problem, because you wouldn't ever point an XBL UA at the XSLT
> stylesheet containing the XBL in a way that the XBL UA would be
> looking for bindings. And even if you did, there wouldn't be a
> problem, because the fact that the document is XSLT instead of XBL
> would cause any number of parts of the binding to be flagged as in
> error and ignored, so there'd be no little or no harm done. And even
> in the extremely unlikely case of an XBL UA being given an XSLT
> document containing XBL that _isn't_ in error and attempting to
> display some content in it, the worst that could happen is that the
> document doesn't make much sense. Which is exactly what happens today
> if you look at an XSLT document which has, say, XHTML in it.
>
> I would assume that the XSLT spec would say that if its attributes
> were present on a root element, indicating that the document was
> really a transformation sheet, the semantics of those elements would
> be neutered, anyway. Does XSLT not say this?
>
> And finally, despite all this, note that this doesn't suggest XBL
> needs a MIME type, since XSLT already has a MIME type, and thus you
> can already distinguish XSLT from XBL.
>
> But if people really want to register a MIME type for XBL, go ahead...
> it doesn't affect the spec or UA compliance in any way. Feel tree to
> register as many types as you like. :-)
>
> --
> Ian Hickson
>
>


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Received on Wednesday, 23 August 2006 21:37:39 UTC