strengthening support for non-XSLT languages

Hi,

there is one part of the current GRDDL editor's draft that I believe is 
problematic:

"""
While javascript, C, or any other programming language technically 
expresses the relevant information, XSLT is specifically designed to 
express XML to XML transformations and has some good safety characteristics.
"""
--http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec#txforms

I understand the wish to use XSLT most of the time, and were I to deploy 
GRDDL XSLT would likely be my choice.

However at WWW2005 I had an interesting conversation with the 
microformats people, and how their efforts could be made to also fit 
into the SemWeb if they used GRDDL. I started explaining how it worked 
and the second I said "XSLT" someone shouted "Stop! You've already lost 
most of the people you're trying to cater to." And the fact of the 
matter is it's true.

I therefore think it would be most useful in the interest of spreading 
GRDDL not only to XML geeks but to Web geeks in general. More obvious 
support for Javascript (including how exactly the script would go about 
getting the document it needs to process and how it would provide its 
output) would go a long way there. It would also have the major 
advantage that it could also apply to old school HTML (some XSLT 
processors can do that too, but it's not always an easy path to tread).

Furthermore I am wondering if thought has been given to using GRDLL as a 
full fledge SemSheets language, with all the features found in style 
sheets today (multiple implementation languages based on the type 
attribute or pseudo-attribute, multiple semantic views of the same 
document, etc.) as well as to ways of having a remote service perform 
the translation (to get the translation of this document, POST it to foo 
and see what you get back).

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Senior Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/

Received on Thursday, 30 June 2005 01:21:04 UTC