Re: A silly idea?

In a message dated 05/09/2002 09:36:49 GMT Daylight Time, rt@cygnets.co.uk 
writes:


> I said that I would like to "future proof" my forms by starting to write
> them in xforms.
> Responses pointed out that xforms is only at working draft 1.0 so any
> xforms generated now might require to be revised several times.
> 
> This triggered the, probably silly, idea that all XML specifications
> (XFROMS, XHTML etc. etc.) should include XSLT stylesheets that would
> take a document conforming to that revision of the specification and
> spit it straight back out.
> 
> This sounds a bit pointless. However such a specification would mean
> people instantly had working stylesheets, conforming to the
> specification, which they could begin to modify. It would also mean
> that, with a bit of cutting and pasting between two specifications,
> stylesheets could be generated that would update xforms compliant with
> earlier specifications to the latest revision. It might even help with
> the generation of stylesheets that translate between say Xforms and
> XHTML, if only for UI markup purposes. Having working stylesheets would
> be a big boost to people like myself who are trying to quickly get to
> grips with several new technologies and it would help standardisation
> and long term maintenance.
> 
> Is this a silly idea, if so why? - fire away.
> 
> Robert

Robert,

It's both a sensible idea and a silly idea. And it's not new.

It's sensible, in principle, because (assuming it were possible) it would be 
nice to be able to use XSLT to update documents which conform to a W3C 
Working Draft to be documents which conform to a final Recommendation.

Why is it not possible, at least using XSLT 1.0 alone?

XSLT is built on XPath. XPath has no way to access or manipulate the DOCTYPE 
declaration. The DOCTYPE declaration inevitably changes between a Working 
Draft and a full Recommendation. So you can't use XSLT to update all of the 
document.

So, it cannot be done using XSLT alone.

Andrew Watt