Re: XPath support for using multiple ixml implementations

Thanks, Sheila, for the great presentation at the Symposium! Fwiw, xmlcalabash supports the type of control you mention. See https://docs.xmlcalabash.com/reference/current/p-ixml.html. 

> On Feb 27, 2026, at 9:00 PM, Sheila Thomson <discuss@bluegumtree.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Thank you, again, to everyone for such an enjoyable Symposium and congratulations to the organisers.
> 
> My (non-markup geek) partner and I were just talking about how, when you have an ambiguous grammar, it's important to choose your iXML parser carefully and that the same parser might not be the best choice for all your ambiguous grammars.  Which led on to thinking about how, if you're calling iXML from within another tool or technology, such as an XML DB, XProc, or XSLT, you might need more than one iXML parser to be supported simultaneously.
> 
> My first thought was that you would probably need multiple configurations of the "outer" application but I don't think that would be very practical with an XML DB, for example.  And, it's conceivable that you might want to use *:invisible-xml with different grammars and parsers within the same XProc pipeline/step or XSLT transformation.  I'm wondering whether there might be scope to support an option in (p|fn):invisible-xml that could be used to specify which ixml parser to use.
> 
> That might be putting the cart before the horse though. Is support for dynamic switching between iXML parsers a topic that's already been discussed? If so, where can I read up on it/what's the current status of this topic?  Is this an unlikely hypothetical or does anyone else see this as a probable eventual requirement for supporting multiple ambiguous grammars?
> 
> Curious,
> Sheila