Re: Retrieving XML

> >Can't we do that now by giving a URI in elementSetNames which refers to an
> >XSLT style sheet, rather than dumping potentially very long stylesheets
> >dynamically at the server for every request?  For retrieval purposes,
> >specifying a style sheet and specifying a schema for the record to be
> >returned in result in the same outcome -- you get the record in a certain
> >format.

> Giving the URI as opposed to shipping the StyleSheet is arguably a 
> simplification, although it does force the Z39.50 server to act as a HTTP 
> client, and it requires the stylesheet to be available somewhere public.

Not necessarily. If people don't want to support on-the-fly style sheets, 
they can use the URI as a string identifier in the same way as they could 
use XPATH as a string identifier.

> But again, it makes no sense to give the server a stylesheet unless you 
> also have a way of telling the server what schema you expect the data to be 
> in *at the beginning* of the transformation.

Right. Stylesheets will only work with schemas that define the elements to 
be transformed.  Isn't there a way to give a Schema URI in a stylesheet 
such that it can check from there if it can produce the necessary XML to 
be transformed? (Question from ignorance, not rhetoric)


> I think we need CompSpec for this... that allows you to give the schema. 
> Then we just need a convention for using a stylesheet as an alternative to 
> Espec-1.

Then we should have used CompSpec for defining XML schemas rather than 
ElementSetNames?

Rob

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Received on Monday, 22 April 2002 08:24:57 UTC