Re: ease of use proposal - adding 'from' attribute to step to define connection

Hello Gerrit/Florent,

thanks for the ammo/data points, these will be very useful when I
present them to WG.

thx once again, J



On 1 December 2014 at 14:08, Imsieke, Gerrit, le-tex
<gerrit.imsieke@le-tex.de> wrote:
> Jim,
>
> I fully agree with Florent. In a previous message, you wrote that connecting
> to non-primary ports has happened more frequently in practice than the XProc
> 1.0 WG anticipated.
>
> While the existing syntactic shortcuts have proven to be useful in linear
> pipelines, there is demand for a more compact notation in cases that still
> suffer from excessive verbosity. Connecting to a single non-primary port
> (your contested third item) happens more frequently than connecting to
> multiple ports (second item). If we want to cater to current and future
> users’ demand, let’s go all the way and have all three connection shortcuts:
>
> – A from attribute for holding reference tokens to the outputs of other
> steps;
> – Where References to multiple ports are space separated;
> – The ability to refer to a certain non-primary port of another step in such
> a reference token.
> I don’t care whether these tokens are formed like step(#port)? or like
> (port@)?step.
>
> As Florent said, it’s almost syntactic sugar. There is a bijection between
> the short and the long form, not by lexical transformation of one form into
> the other though – some pipeline analysis wrt primary ports will be
> necessary.
>
> In my view there is no need to engage in philosophical discussions whether
> we have ID/IDREF relationships when we refer to ports of steps. The tuple of
> port name and step name has to be unique within a step declaration;
> attaching a single ID (@xml:id) to this is purely optional. Please note,
> however, that in contrast to a given @xml:id value, a given tuple of
> step/port names may occur more than once in a single XML file. Consider
> p:library as an example for this.
>
> Furthermore, there is no need to doubt whether the short form is still XML.
> Of course it is. What we are suggesting is not a textual form, like rnc is
> to rng. In order to prove that point, I’ll be happy to provide XSLT 2
> stylesheets that convert short form XML into long form XML and vice versa,
> without resorting to unparsed-text() (only with resorting to tokenize() or
> xsl:analyze-string).
>
> Take this as a heavily invested user’s 2 ct.
>
> Gerrit
>
>
> On 01.12.2014 11:44, Florent Georges wrote:
>>
>>    Thanks Jim.  And no, I am not in a hurry :-)  Just a couple of points:
>>
>>      - your 2d and 3d points are equally a "departure from using XML
>> structure to represent any single one info"; point 2 is using a
>> space-separated list of tokens in a string, instead of using a
>> repeatable element, whilst point 3 is using a special character to
>> separate both parts of a string as a pair of strings
>>
>>      - there is already a syntax using exclusively XML structure to
>> represent information, and this is exactly what the syntax
>> simplification is looking at: providing an alternative to the verbose
>> XML syntax
>>
>>    This is a perma-thread about XML data modelling.  The best example
>> of which, I believe, is the following question.  Is 2015-01-01 a
>> legitimate data type, or should it rather be
>> <date><year>2015</year><month>1</month><day>1</day></date>?
>>
>>    As we have the XML structure approach already, offering an
>> alternative would just be listening to all people having been asking
>> for a simplification, for years.  That some people will not use it
>> should not prevent the simplification to happen.  If we were talking
>> about stopping developing the XML structured version, or reverting it
>> back, I could understand those concerns, but I think they are quite
>> irrelevant when discussing an alternative.
>>
>>    Regards,
>>
>
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Received on Monday, 1 December 2014 13:25:37 UTC