Re: Namespace dispatching

/ Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> was heard to say:
| than the controlling one is at best a syntactic shortcut. No expressive
| ability would be lost by inventing a wrapper element that did nothing
| more than say: "I'm using XSLT and the thing inside me is a literal
| result element". i.e.
|
| <xslt:literal>
|  <html>
|  </html>
| </xslt:literal>

For the record, Section 2.3 of the XSLT 1.0 Recommendation describes
exactly what wrappers a literal result element stylesheet implies.

| "Which of the following are appropriate triggers for determining the
| document type of an XML document when metadata is unavailable:
|
|  1 DOCTYPE statement

Sure. (I assume you mean the public and system identifiers in addition
to the root element name).

|  2 top-level namespace

Sure.

|  3 schema reference declaration

Unlikely given that the declaration is only a hint.

|  4 other root-level declared namespaces

Maybe, depending on what kind of dispatching you want to do. But since
namespaces are scoped, you probably need to look at the whole tree if you're
worried about things other than the root elements qname.

|  5 any attribute on the root element

Maybe.

|  6 anything in the document"

Yeah, like I said for 4.

| I have not seen a compelling use-case for anything other than 1 and 2.

Display all the MathML equations in this document. Display all the SVG
diagrams. Present a concordance of Japanese words...

| Most of the others are just typing conveniences, IMO.

This thread goes on to talk about nested wrappers and things as if all
typing conveniences were just shortcuts for nested wrappers, but I
don't think that's true. As for processing models, well, I think something
dependency based is probably a better choice than nested wrappers.
But I would say that, wouldn't I?[1] :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-pipeline/

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM   | There is a great difference between seeking
XML Standards Engineer | how to raise a laugh from everything, and
XML Technology Center  | seeking in everything what may justly be
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | laughed at.--Lord Shaftesbury

Received on Monday, 4 March 2002 10:05:49 UTC