Re: XSLT non-XML output (was: standard components edits)

On 4/17/07, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:
>
>
> Mohamed,
>
> Innovimax SARL wrote:
> > On 4/17/07, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:
> >> IMO, the result of an XSLT transformation is always a (sequence of)
> >> documents (node trees). It's only when they're serialised (a separate
> >> step, with no output) that you might get a text or HTML document.
> >
> > But are we going to tell to people that already have crafted their
> > foo2csv or foo2html xslt stylesheet, that if they want to put it into
> > XProc, they won't be able to do that ?
>
> IMO, we *must* support serialization to HTML documents. But I think it's
> perfectly acceptable to do so via a separate step:
>
> <p:xslt>
>    <p:input name="stylesheet">
>      <p:document href="foo2html.xsl" />
>    </p:input>
> </p:xslt>
> <p:serialize>
>    <p:option name="href" value="result.html" />
>    <p:option name="method" value="html" />
> </p:serialize>


We have a store step and so we could add a serialization method option to
that
step.

I would also like to have a way of associating a serialization method to a
pipeline output so that when an implementation "binds" the output, it knows
what serialization is preferred.  For example, if a pipeline is used to
implement
a web service that is suppose to return HTML, I'd like the ability to say:

<p:pipeline name="service" ...>
   <p:output name="result" method="html">
      ...
   </p:output>
...
</p:pipeline>

Maybe this is done via another element:


<p:pipeline name="service" ...>
   <p:output name="result">
       <p:serialization method="html"/>
      ...
   </p:output>
...
</p:pipeline>

or another binding element:

<p:pipeline name="service" ...>
   <p:output name="result">
      ...
   </p:output>
   <p:serialization method="html" port="result"/>
...
</p:pipeline>

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics