Re: Proposal: replace here documents with a component

Norman Walsh wrote:
> / Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.org> was heard to say:
> [...]
> | While that might be unfortunate in some odd situations, the utility of
> | having "here" documents *exactly* where they are using is very
> | important and I don't want that facility to go away.
> |
> | I'm not in favor of this proposal as it moves statically known inputs
> | to dynamically known inputs and that means that component-level
> | optimizations (e.g. pre-compiling the XSLT) are completely lost.
> 
> Nonsense. There's nothing that prevents you from knowing that
> p:document components are static (they are!) or from doing any
> compilations that you want.

OK.  Except now you are computing an optimization for something was
easily known before.  I could say the exact opposite in that you
can easily recognize a here document and fabricate a step for it.

Personally, I think this is far less usable than just putting the
document where you need it.

All this doesn't preclude the need for a "document" component.  That
component is necessary for inputs that are shared.

The canonical use case here is the XSLT transform being embedded
in the pipeline itself.  What we have right now allows the XSLT step
to be specified with one self-contained step (i.e. cut-n-paste is
easy).  This proposal would mean you'd have two steps to do the
exact same thing.

--Alex Milowski

Received on Thursday, 21 September 2006 17:17:36 UTC