Namespace documents

I have a long-standing XSL WG action

ACTION-2015-11-19-002 MHK to ensure that the build system
creates up-to-date namespace documents  for the XSLT and MAP
namespaces.

Here's a review of the current status.

The namespace document at

http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions/

states:

This document describes the namespace http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions defined by the [XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators 3.1] and [XSLT 3.0] specifications (October 2014 and November 2014 versions, respectively). This namespace is identified by the namespace prefix fn:, which is a predefined prefix. For updated information, please refer to the latest version of the [XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators 3.1] and [XSLT 3.0] specifications.

It hasn't been updated to the latest CR documents: I'm not sure if that will result in any changes other than the formal changes to dates.

The namespace document also includes fn:put which is in neither of those specifications... 

It also describes the schemas for this namespace (for the analyze-string and json-to-xml functions).

The document is built by target ns-xpath-functions in the F+O3.1 build, using the stylesheet ns-xpath-functions.xsl. This is driven from the two function catalog documents for F+O 3.1 and XSLT 3.0, so it automatically picks up the current data. The boilerplate information (specifically, dates of specs) however comes from entity definitions in ns-xpath-functions.xml, which have not been updated to the latest versions.

The process for the math, map, and array namespaces is very similar, except that in this case there is no reference to the XSLT specifications.

What needs to happen?

1. We need to update the boilerplate in files such as ns-xpath-functions.xml to include the latest spec dates. The build system should then automatically create up-to-date namespace documents.

2. We need to ensure that these up-to-date documents are staged.

3. On the assumption that XSLT 3.0 will ship later than F+O 3.1, at the time we ship XSLT 3.0 we may need to regenerate the namespace documents and republish them (using the F+O build process).

Michael Kay
Saxonica

Received on Thursday, 12 January 2017 15:30:32 UTC