XPath, XPointer & Re: XSLT and XSL

I spent some length of last week in the office of Sharon Adler,
co-chair of the XSL WG, discussing this.  It's certainly her opinion
that trying to use XPath or XPointer as currently defined as a filter
is meaningless.  XPointer is just intended to give you a pointer into
an XML document.  It doesn't yield XML.  XPath just gives you an
unordered node set.  It doesn't yield XML.  XSLT, on the other hand,
can give you XML, although even conformant XSLT processors are not
required to be able to output XML.  XSLT has provisions via the
"output" element for specifying the additional parameters you would
need to know to generate XML.  Of course, there is nothing stopping us
from defining dsigXPointer and/or dsigXPath which do yield XML.

Thanks,
Donald

From:  "Joseph M. Reagle Jr." <reagle@w3.org>
Resent-Date:  Thu, 21 Oct 1999 17:04:54 -0400 (EDT)
Resent-Message-Id:  <199910212104.RAA21721@www19.w3.org>
Message-Id:  <3.0.5.32.19991021170445.00934490@localhost>
Date:  Thu, 21 Oct 1999 17:04:45 -0400
To:  "John Boyer" <jboyer@uwi.com>
Cc:  "IETF/W3C XML-DSig WG" <w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org>
In-Reply-To:  <NDBBLAOMJKOFPMBCHJOIOELNCBAA.jboyer@uwi.com>
References:  <3.0.5.32.19991021142506.00a40ae0@localhost>

>At 12:51 99/10/21 -0700, John Boyer wrote:
>Reagle wrote:
> >3. I don't think we should have an XSL and XSLT. One or the other, though
> >the spec is confusing about it.
> >
> ><John>
> >I got the impression that XSL could give you the final HTML that a person
> >would look at.  I also could not tell on a single 14 hour Saturday which
> >part of this could not be done by the XSLT, but that's at least partly
> >because the combined spec length is over 350 pages.  I thought it best for
> >now to allow a full stylesheet to be put in and let it modify the data to
> >the point where it represents what the user actually sees.  Again, this was
> >in keeping with the motto "What you see is what you sign" which I think was
> >reiterated in that email from Don.
> ></John>
> >
> >1. XSLT is a subset of XSL that specifies the transformation methods, XSL
> >also includes the formatting object syntax.
> >2. XSL is merely one sort of XSLT used for formatting.
> >
> >I opted for #2.
> >
> ><John>It is not clear what #2 means.  In the spec, you seem to have chosen
> >XSLT. Depending on how I read 1 and 2, you either did or did not choose
>XSL.
> >Is there some newer draft we don't have?
> ></John>
> 
>By that I mean we have a XSLT blob. One particular type of XSLT is to
>transform a source document into a target document with XSL formatting. 
>
>_________________________________________________________
>Joseph Reagle Jr.   
>Policy Analyst           mailto:reagle@w3.org
>XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://w3.org/People/Reagle/

Received on Monday, 25 October 1999 09:30:19 UTC