Re: XPath support for using multiple ixml implementations

I brought up something in the Q&A of my presentation that is one of the minor drawbacks of despatching the parsing from within XSLT.

When a grammar is violated on input, the line/column information is useful as a diagnostic to feed back to the lay user.

When a grammar is violated in a "sub-parse"(?) then that line/column information is in the context of that despatch. There is no line/column information being conveyed in the original parse that gives context to diagnostic information coming from despatching.

I mentioned in my slide that foreign namespace annotations in the output from the original parse can give context for multiple purposes, especially in the case where I would be despatching a block of user input for further analysis.

But what we have certainly is valuable! I'm just trying to create an environment for lay users where I can do as much handholding as I can.

At 02/03/2026 09:54 +0000, Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:
>"Graydon Saunders" <graydonish@fastmail.com> writes:
>> So I can see an extension of that approach where you would want to switch parsers as well as grammars
>
>I think one reasonable approach for “different grammars in different contexts” is to use XPath (in 4.0) or XSLT (with CoffeeSacks, for example) to select the context in XPath/XSLT then parse with the grammar you want.
>
>That said, I still want to experiment with allowing grammar authors to do this directly. To have a grammar that matches “big complicated thing” with a simple rule and then passes the matched thing off to a different grammar to parse its structure. Not because it’s impossible to do this in one grammar but because it might be a lot easier for authors if they could keep them separate.
>
>                                        Be seeing you,
>                                          norm
>
>--
>Norm Tovey-Walsh
>Saxonica


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Received on Tuesday, 3 March 2026 18:15:04 UTC