Re: XML/XSL Variants

At 10:23 AM -0400 6/26/98, Judith Slein wrote:
>Here is a case I received from a co-worker here at Xerox that we might want
>to try to accommodate in our treatment of variants.

>>Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 20:06:10 -0400 (EDT)
>>From: "Corda,Ugo" <Ugo_Corda@es.xerox.com>

>>I was wondering if the current WebDAV Variants specification can handle
>> the case of a single XML document with multiple XSL style sheets associated.

My feeling is that the WebDAV variants stuff may not be an apporiate place
to handle this issue. The notion of multiple processing specifications is
inherent to XML, and XML will need (and define) mechanisms to associate
stylesheets, default stylesheets and so on with XML documents. Since the
data sent on the wire for an XML document probably won't vary, and the
stylesheets won't, I'd say that we're into very media-type specific stuff
here -- and also in a zone where XML will have to make its own policy
decisions anyway, so that DAV should (at least) wait until those have been
made.

>>I imagine this is a somewhat special case compared to the usual
>> examples of multiple language versions or multiple renditions (e.g.
>> Word, PDF, etc.) of the same document. Here the different XSLs are not
>> renditions themselves, but they are instead combined with the XML
>> information to produce renditions (via an appropriate processor). Not
>> only the renditions, but the contents of particular renditions can be
>> completely different from each other, depending on what information
>> has been filtered out of the  XML contents in each case.

It is true that the renditions may well vary in information content (with
hidden/changed data masked or added by different XSL specs), but since the
HTTP data streams should be the same, I think this isn't a DAV issue.

>>I can also imagine that this might have significant implications in
>> terms of content negotiation.

Yes, content negotiation may be one way to solve the stylesheet variation
problem, and maybe even the XSL association problem.

  -- David

PS I'm going to CC this reply to the XML-sig list as a piece of useful
input to their process.

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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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Received on Friday, 26 June 1998 11:45:46 UTC