- From: Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>
- Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 12:16:22 -0500
- To: public-xml-processing-model-wg@w3.org
- Message-ID: <87d5j67fyx.fsf@nwalsh.com>
Draft minutes are now available:
http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2006/01/05-minutes.html
Text copy below:
W3C[1]
- DRAFT -
XML Processing Model WG Weekly Teleconference
5 Jan 2006
Agenda[2]
See also: IRC log[3]
Attendees
Present
Norm, Jeni, Michael, Paul, Erik, Alessandro, Andrew, Alex, Henry,
Richard, Rui
Regrets
Robin
Chair
Norm
Scribe
Norm
Contents
* Topics
1. Accept this agenda
2. Accept minutes from the previous teleconference
3. Next meeting: 12 Jan 2006
4. Tech Plenary registration is now open
5. Iteration
6. Requirements
7. Any other business
----------------------------------------------------------------------
**
**
<scribe> Scribe: Norm
<scribe> ScribeNick: Norm
Date: 05 Jan 2006
Accept this agenda
http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2006/01/05-agenda.html[4]
Accepted.
Accept minutes from the previous teleconference
http://www.w3.org/2005/12/22-xproc-minutes.html[5]
Accepted
Next meeting: 12 Jan 2006
Any regrets for next week? None given.
Tech Plenary registration is now open
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35125/TP2006/[6]
Iteration
Any discussion of iteration?
ht: I came up with a use case this week: using a pipeline to construct a
soap message, send it off, the result containing multiple instances of
document which are in turn used to construct soap messages and send them
out.
... This pipeline doesn't produce a new document, it just iterates over
some results from soap messages.
richard: This is iteration over multiple subtrees in the same document.
Last week we were talking about iteration over multiple documents.
ht: Indeed, but it raises the question of whether we want to think about
an abstraction over the kinds of things that go through pipelines.
Alex: ht's example is very much like a lot of things I do. What I've been
doing is treating the elements that match as their own sub-documents or
just documents and the steps in the processes just treat them like
documents that could have come in separately.
... And then on the sub-document I run a pipeline over that.
... The abstraction that I'm using is a sequence of documents.
ht: Do we want at this early stage to go from a simple view that says a
pipeline has a document that goes through it to one that has a sequence of
documents flowing through it.
... harder to explain, to understand, and slightly harder to implement.
<ht> ht: ... but more powerful
Erik: the way we do this with XPL, as an example, is to just provide a
facility for iteration that allows for extraction from a node from a
document using XPath.
... We can select //something, for example, and then iterating over each
of the elements returned.
... this is a solution that doesn't require a sequence of documents.
Alex: But aren't they really virtually there?
Erik: Well, yes, but it's iteration over a subset of the pipeline without
adding a sequence type to the pipeline language.
... The concept of sequence in XPL is limited to iteration
Alex: Both XSLT2 and XQuery support sequences and we are, I assume, going
to want to support them.
... I have another component that can produce an aggregate. I think the
idea of sequence as a primary thing in the language is very important.
Architecturally, it lets us have a clear view at the language level of two
different types of components, one that can process a sequence and another
that only supports a single document (compare XSLT 2 and XSLT 1). We could
define the semantics of how you process a sequence with a component that
only handles a single doc
ument.
Richard: You've suggested here that there are some components that
understand sequences. Then a pipeline controller could know what to do
with a sequence. This raises the question then of whether you're allowed
to write components that are allowed to maintain state between the
documents passed through them.
Alex: I can see that as a real concern. XQuery does maintain a state over
the whole sequence. It seems like its component-dependent.
... As soon as you have a component that requires the whole document,
streaming stops. I think the same thing would hold true for XSLT 2 or
XQuery with respect to sequences.
... When I deal with sequences I use the subtree-selection and that's my
iteration thing for producing a sequence that I then iterate a pipeline
over.
richard: There's also the question of what you do with the output of some
sort of an iteration component. Merging them back into a single doucment
might be sufficient.
Alex: Yes, there's a real issue here with how you deal with sequences and
components that don't know what do with sequences
... I deal with sequences and the receiver either knows what to do or it
HCFs.
richard: Your point about XSLT having to buffer up the whole document
seems to me to be a good argument in favor of sequences instead of always
packaging things into one document.
... OTOH, in some cases allowing for streaming within processes may cause
that problem. Rather than having an explicit sequence, you could have a
component that takes a packaged up document and runs a process on subtrees
with in it.
Alex: one of the things I use all the time is the ability to scope an XSLT
to process only a subtree.
<richard> correction: streaming might *solve* the problem
Alex: The way I deal with this is to say that the baseline is always
streaming and if you need the whole doucment there's a little adapter that
lets you build the whole document.
... streaming and dealing with subtrees is really critical to me.
ack, ht
<Zakim> ht, you wanted to struggle with the difference between iteration
vs. dataflow
ht: I just want to mention for future reference that part of the problem
here arises from different models: one perspective is the programming
language perspective, an xml scripting language, in which context talking
about iteration makes great sense. But another perspective is data flow.
In data flow, there isn't any iteration, there's just data.
... They're duals: the dual of iteration in data flow is sequences.
There's a tradeoff in both implementation and conceptual terms between
these two ways of thinking about these things
Alex: We should try to write a declaritive language that doesn't force
that choice, either should be possible.
ack
<Zakim> ht, you wanted to mention the tension between streaming and error
recovery
ht: Streaming is great and often what you want to do, but I think it's
worth noting that once you try to provide gaurantees about error
protection, there's a tension between knowning that one step has finished
without error before the next starts.
Alex: yes, there's definitely tension there. Maybe there are requirements
here we should articulate.
richard: We could say that if you want synchronous error handling you have
to add a component to support that.
Requirements
Norm observes that we have a few requirements documents out there
Alessandro summarizes the requirements that he posted yesterday.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-wg/2006Jan/0002.html[7]
<Zakim> richard, you wanted to mention the tension between streaming and
multiple inputs
richard: If you have streaming inputs then the question of multiple inputs
becomes somewhat difficult. SAX doesn't really work for multiple inputs if
you have independent streams.
... Another way to do it is to consider one input the principle input and
the other inputs to be the explicit actions of the processes
<Zakim> ht, you wanted to be nervous about 'while'
ht: I think the matter of turing completeness can be overplayed and it's
hard to come up with useful tools that aren't vulnerable to various DOS
attacks, but "while" has properties that none of the other constructs have
in that regard and I've only recently come up with a case where maybe I'd
like to have it.
... I think "while" wants to be in some sort of "maybe" category IMO.
<Zakim> Norm, you wanted to ask what "for each" means at the pipeline
level and to ask for more detail about "fallback behavior"
<Alessandro> Alessandro agrees with ht
Alex: It's a maybe but it is useful. It would be nice to have a mechanism
for extending the language that might allow others to implement something
like "while".
<richard> can ht and alex give examples of what they mean by "while"
ht: I think that's right. It's one thing to say that there's a component
that uses "while", it's entirely another to say that you can change the
syntax of the language to put a while scope around a component.
Alex: To my pipleline language, everything is a pipeline step.
<ht> richard, e.g. run the output of this step/pipeline back in as its
input while some xpath is satisfied
Alex: Do we have a language with iteration and conditionals etc. or do we
just have a collection of components some of which implement those
features.
Norm asks Alessandro what he meant by "fallback behavior"
Alessandro: I was thinking of "try/catch/finally" sort of construct
<ht> norm, 'catch' is the fallback in a try/catch construction
<MSM> (except without the ability to throw)
<alexmilowski> Example of while: translate an ATOM entry feed with "next"
elements into one large atom feed
ht describes his "while" example from IRC above.
richard: In languages like C and Java, while and for are just minor
syntactic variants. Here they're quite different.
<alexmilowski> The next element points to another chunk of the feed. The
result of following the feed next element may be another feed with another
next element.
ht: Right. We've been talking about for-each not a general purpose for.
richard: Alex you were suggesting that all the control structures could be
components, is that right?
Alex: Yes
richard: Right. So that provides completely general extensibility in
control strucutre but has the downside of having the control structure
opaque in the sense that it uses any non-standard control structures. It's
harder to build tools to display the structure.
Alex: My pipeline language itself is really defined by the components. A
component has an element, the element has a syntax and may specify a
subpipeline that it runs
... But it does cause problems for authoring tools.
<Zakim> ebruchez, you wanted to mention that extensibility is good, but
core syntax has to remain clear
Erik: I just wanted to say that it would be nice if it's extensible, but
we need to have a clear core syntax.
... I don't have any particular opinion at this moment, but we should try
to keep the syntax simple for the core features.
Alex: One example of a language that's proved to be very exensible is Ant.
It has a core set of concepts, but everything else is an extension.
Erik: Yes, I understand that. If everything is working with infosets then
that might be very possible.
Norm suggests that we begin writing a requirements documents
Alex: concurs
Norm asks for an editor
Alex: I'm willing.
<Jeni> Rui also wrote some requirements at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-wg/2006Jan/0000.html[8]
Norm agrees to help Alex get started up
ht: Is there anyone who can explain NVDL
Norm: NVDL sent us an explicit list of requirements.
Its task is validation of mixed-namespace documents, by taking your
document and producing a lot of different subtrees
an HTML + MathML document may turn / will turn into an HTML document and a
MathML fragment.
The HTML goes to an HTML validator, the MathML goes to a mathML validator.
<ht> HST notes DTD validation adds attributes too. . .
And at the end, they want to be able to stitch things together again at
the end.
alexmilowski: pipelines can certainly do that, but what a crazy way to do
it.
Norm: you are able to insert stub elements, to prevent the equation
element in the parent document from being empty.
[Docbook example]
<ht> HST believes NVDL also gives you the ability to specify, for each
fragment, what static resources, e.g. DTDs, Schemas, to use
alexmilowski: why not just ... ?
Norm: the idea is to allow this to work without your having to change the
individual schemas.
alexmilowski: an interesting use case: what if you have multiple
validators for the equation, and they say different things?
alexmilowski: even if I wouldn't do validation that way, it's still a
useful and interesting use case.
<ht> HST hopes the minutes will show Alex's suggestion about infoset
annotation in general, and PSVI validity annotation in particular
<Zakim> ebruchez, you wanted to quickly talk about NVDL
Erik: NVDL has some pretty well defined use cases to explain why they do
it that way
<Zakim> richard, you wanted to mention issues of dividing and recomposing
a document in complicated ways
<ht> The PSVI issue is, roughly, the question of _what_ flows through the
pipeline -- serialised XML documents, 'vanilla' XML infosets, arbitrary
infosets, . . .
richard: I wanted to contrast this problem with the simpler case of
passing small parts of a document through some othe rprocess and then
reassmbling them.
... In this case the depth of nesting of structure is arbitrary. So either
you need a component that can decompose a document this way or you need
the flow of the pipeline to be controlled by the hierarchy of the
document.
... That's a much more dynamic kind of pipeline than we've considered
before.
<ht> Concretely, will the pipeline language support some standard way for
a pipeline step which follows an XML Schema validation step to access the
[validity] and [validation attempted] properties of items in the infoset.
. .
Any other business
None.
ADJOURNED
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] http://www.w3.org/
[2] http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2006/01/05-agenda.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2006/01/05-xproc-irc
[4] http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2006/01/05-agenda.html
[5] http://www.w3.org/2005/12/22-xproc-minutes.html
[6] http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35125/TP2006/
[7] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-wg/2006Jan/0002.html
[8] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-wg/2006Jan/0000.html
[9] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/scribe/scribedoc.htm
[10] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2002/scribe/
Minutes formatted by David Booth's scribe.perl[9] version 1.127 (CVS
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$Date: 2006/01/05 17:05:45 $
Received on Thursday, 5 January 2006 17:16:44 UTC